The Legacy of Krypton
by TakemyKryptonite
Summary: This story follows Superman, Wonder Woman and the Justice League from different viewpoints. A lot of the story is based in real-world locations and deals with the changes that Kryptonians and their technology would bring about on Earth. The story has the whole roster of DC heroes and villains, but the main focus is Kal and Diana. I promise the story has something for everyone.
1. Chapter A

The universe was infinite. Even for someone such as Clark Kent, a Kryptonian with abilities of unfathomable power, there was no way the entirety of it could be understood or explored. Hell, the Earth was a small, inconsequential planet in a wayward sector, and he'd yet to uncover all its mysteries even with his speed and heightened cognition. He was pondering this as he lay on the roof of the Kent farm's old barn, gazing at the stars that lay unfurled above him, a cosmic tapestry. A beer cooler gave him silent company and Beethoven's 7th played on his Samsung.

He sat up abruptly and paused the music. He tilted his head and closed his eyes. There, it was very faint. He could barely hear it, but there was a high frequency pulse, in a specific bandwidth that he'd come to associate with Kryptonian communications and he recognised this particular call as a distress signal. He discarded his clothing and shot off in the nude, activating his nano suit which generated from a medallion around his neck and covered his body. The sigil of the House of El was outlined on his wide chest and his cape billowed behind him as he took off at hypersonic speeds to investigate the source of the signal. He first flew in a direction perpendicular to the direction he could hear the signal from and after he got a few good locks, he quickly used that data to triangulate the signal precisely to a few millimetres. His eidetic memory informed him that it was emanating from a tributary of a major river in the Peruvian Andes; Clark had memorised the Earth's surface from a two thousand page atlas one day when he'd been nine years old.

He dived into an overflowing, frothing river, coloured brown as it dragged the mud from its banks along with it. Clark's vision helped pinpoint the craft that seemed to be emitting the signal and had no trouble digging it out from where it was embedded in the riverbed. He broke the troubled waters and flew the ship to an open, grassy meadow a few miles away. He placed it gently on the ground and observed the craft which seemed to be of Kryptonian origin. It was as large as an SUV, but much more aerodynamic and shaped like a cone with its nose cut off. The craft he'd come in as a baby had been of a different design and much smaller.

He ran his hand over the smooth Kryptonian metal. The ship seemed pristine on the outside. Even its delicate guidance wings were in perfect condition, which made sense since there were few elements on Earth that could possibly affect Kryptonian metal and the few that could weren't naturally occurring. Trailing his fingers on the cool surface, he walked around to where a control panel was gently embossed into the framework and placed his hand over it. A blue scanning light flashed over his palm and a smooth voice came from the craft, speaking in flawless Kryptonian.

"Fellow Kryptonian, this is Zor-El of the El family of Krypton. This ship was sent from our planet just before it was extinguished by the will of Rao. It harbours my daughter and my hope, Kara Zor-El. I sense that your DNA is Kryptonian and of my family, but I don't understand how a Kryptonian still survives, much less one who shares my blood. This artificial intelligence construct does not contain the information necessary to adapt and respond to this scenario. However, I am very glad that my daughter will not be the only Kryptonian in this universe and that she will have a family member with her, I leave her in your kind care."

Clark blinked as the voice cut off. He had a cousin? And she was here? He heard a muted hiss, and a door slowly appeared from the smooth metal surface and dissolved into the surrounding frame, leaving open a wide entrance. Clark floated up and looked down through the opening into the interior of the ship. His eyes widened and he exhaled deeply. Lying peacefully inside, on a rich, dark blue cushion was one of the most beautiful women he'd seen in his short but eventful life.

His eyes took her in for just a microsecond and her otherworldly beauty was burned into his perfect memory. Her waist length blonde hair was laid over her shoulders in gentle waves, covering the curves of her ample chest. She was fully clothed from the neck down in what looked like a version of his nano suit, except that it was coloured pure white. It certainly left nothing to the imagination, he thought, as it faithfully hugged every curve of her young body. He saw her vitals on a monitor at her side and checked that her body functions were normal. He re-engaged the door and watched it close over the young woman. He gently lifted up the craft, keenly aware of its precious cargo, the only other Kryptonian in existence, his only remaining family.

* * *

Clark sat back with a steaming mug of coffee as he watched Kal-Ex, the android companion of the El family, perform the complicated procedures needed to safely bring out a Kryptonian from hibernation. The procedures were built into the ship she'd come in, but Kal chose to use the superior equipment in his Medical Bay. His communicator beeped, and he swiftly apprised the alert that the Mainframe computer of the Fortress had sent his way.

He stood up, sighing. As much as he'd like to be here when his young cousin awoke, his duties called to him. Besides, he reasoned, she'd recognise Kal-Ex instantly since he'd been a servant to all members of the El House. He left the Fortress of Solitude with express instructions to Kal-Ex to have him informed as soon as she stirred. He flew directly to the Japanese islands, where his Mainframe had picked up signals of a potentially devastating earthquake from his array of early warning seismic detectors.

He surveyed the area from a height of 50 kilometres, using his vision to observe the faults beneath the region and hearing the murmurs of tectonic plates shifting, which allowed him to estimate the pressure build up in each locality. The mainland would largely be fine, there would be little that the disaster relief teams couldn't handle. His Mainframe had already sent out detailed communiqués to the Japanese government and the UN, and he observed people in the region prepare for the imminent earthquake. The Okinawa prefecture, he noted, was going to be badly hit, most of its infrastructure would go down and its disaster relief teams would themselves be stranded. He tapped the communicator on his wrist and requested the Fortress to send out two Flat Deck ships and his Ground Station. It responded instantly, "ETA two minutes and thirty-five seconds".

He'd come up with the idea for the Flat Decks a year ago when during a natural disaster, he'd found himself spending too much time flying people to medical centers, not giving him enough time to rescue every trapped person. He'd designed and built ten Flat Decks in the following months, the goal being that of a mobile platform that could hover over an affected area, safely holding people while rescues were made below. He'd designed it to operate in the harshest conditions possible on Earth and they could even be deployed deep underwater. The ships' features had certainly been overkill, but he always opted to perfect his engineering, one never knew how the next disaster would present itself. And once Orin, known as Aquaman to the larger population, had learned of the underwater capabilities of the ship, he'd financed 5 of the ships himself, intelligently looking out for the future of his underwater kingdom of Atlantis.

Kal directed his Ground Station ship to set up on the main Okinawa island while choosing to spread the two Flat Decks out at equal distances over the other islands. By now, the people of Earth had understood how Superman did things, and so the instant the people saw the building-sized Ground Station fly into Okinawa, they stirred into action, hope flowing into their hearts, Superman was here!

The Ground Station was a particularly stunning piece of Kryptonian engineering, a product of Jor-El's imagination and skill coupled with Clark's additions to allow it operate in Earth's conditions. It took up the area of three city blocks when it came to rest over a wide open area. Although it could stay endlessly afloat, powered as it was by the core of a Dwarf Star, it chose to extend ten metre high supports and landed gently on the ground. The elevators placed at different points on the ship descended to ground level, and humanoid robots wearing the symbol of Superman deployed from the ship, flying out over the roughly 150 islands, scanning for people in need of help or rescue.

Superman observed and directed all of this from his perch above the islands. He lifted his wrist to see the hologram that now popped up from his communicator. An emergency call from the Green Lantern John Stewart.

"Yes, John?" he asked.

"Clark, Busan has been hit pretty bad and I need a Flat Deck," John requested.

"Deploying one right away. Take care, John," he said, and dispatched a ship from the Fortress to Busan, South Korea. He looked to his left across the sea at Busan and his keen eyes saw John weaving in and out of fallen buildings, his green projections rescuing people and prying open fractured concrete. Clark stayed around for a few more hours watching and helping his robots and John in their rescues but his presence was no longer necessary here. The death rate was in the low tens, and most of the rescues were already done.

"John, I'm headed back. I'll see you this weekend at the League meeting," he signed off. "Send Shayera my regards."

"Will do Superman, I appreciate the assist."

The medical treatment of the injured would be handled by the medical teams that were scheduled to fly in from around the world to his Ground Station in under an hour. He'd originally debated having his robots do the medical treatments themselves, a capability that he'd already programmed into them. But he'd finally decided that doing everything himself would hinder the development of the human race and so he'd set up a system with the help of the UN that would allow all countries to volunteer their best doctors and send them to whatever area was worst hit.

There used to be a time when Clark would stick around for days together without a minute's respite and try to help each individual. But as rewarding as that felt and as helpful as it was to people, he was just one person, and he couldn't let himself let down people because he wanted to be personally involved with each and every rescue. And so, Clark found better ways to help. He put his powerful intellect to work and devised ways to ensure that the least number of humans suffered. People usually asked him what his life's motto was, wondering what complex ideal drove his efforts. But that was really it, the simply defined goal of seeing next to no one suffer on Earth was at the bottom of everything he did.

He flew back to the Fortress, taking a leisurely dip in the Arctic seas as he went, washing off the dirt from his suit in the pleasantly freezing waters. He spotted Krypto in the distance, stalking a Polar Bear. The Kryptonian dog he'd grown up with liked teasing the gentle giants despite Kal's numerous warnings. Kal grinned widely and using his heat vision, cut out a circular hole in the ice beneath Krypto. With a surprised yelp, Krypto went into the frigid Arctic waters. He floated out a second later, soaked, and with a none too pleased expression on his doggy face. He turned to look at Kal with a raised eyebrow as if asking him, "Really, Kal-El?"

Clark grinned at Krypto and dove into the waters himself. He swam with powerful strokes to where he knew his Fortress was in the distance, extending upwards from the murky depths of the sea. It reached up to precisely a hundred meters below the surface of the water. The body of water above the Fortress and immediately surrounding it wasn't actually water. It was a stealth liquid that he'd engineered with the help of John Henry Irons, Atlantean engineers, and Victor Stone. Made of Apokoliptian elements and Nth metal, the heavy liquid had some amazing properties. It blocked any and all electromagnetic signals that passed through it, including those in the optical spectrum. This meant that no civilisation, human or otherwise, could detect the massive Fortress. The Nth metal atom in the molecules also neutralised detection by magic.

He dove in to the liquid and swam blindly through, trusting his muscle memory to remember the entrance at the top of the Fortress and he shot through the force field that guarded it and kept out the liquid and the water above it. The field phased around him, drying him instantly. The entrance was at the ceiling of an immense hangar and he floated down gently through the air and landed on the tarmac, a full half a kilometre beneath the roof. Next to where he'd landed, he saw his robots performing maintenance work on seven of his battle cruisers. He'd sent them out to help the Almeracians repel a Khund invasion and they'd taken some light damage in the battle. He smiled thinking of the previous day's events. The Almeracian Queen, Maxima, had accompanied the returning cruisers and had insisted she thank him _personally_ for his help. And well, who was he to resist a Queen really? She had left many pleasurable hours later, with a wide smile on her face and an unsure gait. Those Almeracians got upto some nasty business, he mused, but Clark wasn't complaining at all.

He entered Elevator Platform 29 and directed the interface to take him down to Level 8. Levels 2-7 were designated for aviation, that's where his ships were designed and built, before finally being delivered on Level 1, where they could take off and be sent out through the force field. Levels 9 through 24 were his personal Fortress, and till date, few had set foot on those floors, their persuasion always female and their business here strictly pleasure. Level 8 was where he'd left the young Kryptonian woman, his Med Bay. The last visitor there had been Bruce Wayne, a few months ago, when the Batman had lost a lot of blood and a couple of fingers to a particularly deadly attack from Bernadeth, one of Darkseid's Furies. He hadn't told Bruce where they were of course, choosing simply to tell him that this was a secret League facility.

Bruce had been unconscious when he'd been brought in and Clark had him teleported out directly from the Med Bay rather than risk the keen eyed detective seeing his Aviation Bay. Bruce wasn't too happy about that part, but he'd been secretly impressed with Clark's secretiveness, glad that he was becoming less naïve to the ways of the world. But having his fingers regenerated definitely helped in improving Bruce's mood, and he'd even given Clark an awkward one-armed hug. Clark made sure to bring that up at every League meeting, just to tease the Dark Knight, and well... to hear Diana laugh too.

As he descended into the facility, he spotted the woman quietly conversing with Kal-Ex. She was awake! Hearing the quiet hiss of the platform docking, she turned and looked directly at him, her eyes swiftly taking in his armour's crest of the house they both shared. He met her eyes, a lighter shade of cerulean than his and he sensed the shock and grief that swirled just beneath the surface. His heart went out to her.

She'd just learned of the fate of their species.


	2. Chapter B

_She'd just learned the fate of their species._

* * *

He slowly stepped off the elevator platform, and with another muted hiss, it floated off to the top level. He approached the woman... no, his cousin, as she gave him with a heart-wrenching look. Kal guessed that she was feeling overwhelmed by the content and the sheer amount of information she'd received. _Damn, I should have told Kal-Ex not to tell her everything._

You see, a Kryptonian under a red sun has an exceptional brain, carved by millions of years of natural evolution and then by generations of careful genetic engineering. After he'd set up the Fortress and its advanced labs, Kal had studied an average human brain along with a non-powered Kryptonian one, courtesy of Zod. He'd found to his surprise that although Kryptonian brains vastly outclassed a human's in every aspect, it was the former's efficiency that made them truly remarkable. A Kryptonian brain processed data much differently. In a human brain, most of the brain's significant processing power is hidden away in subsystems like pattern recognition or linguistics, which humans have no direct control over. Humans are thus left with a mere fraction of their brain's processing capability, which is unable to handle even simple conscious problems like computing a long but basic arithmetic problem. His species, however, through gene editing, had not only developed their higher brain functions but also gave themselves complete access to its entire capabilities.

Just imagine that you're allowed to use the world's most advanced supercomputer, but then you're told that all you can do is to play a 2D game of Snake. That's essentially the human brain, whereas a Kryptonian has access to 99% of their brain's power, the slightly obscured one percent being essential life systems that are safeguarded from conscious manipulation. Now, remember, all this was under a red sun. No powers, no _super_.

But a Kryptonian's mind under a yellow sun? Absolutely magnificent. Under yellow sunlight. the body of a Kryptonian essentially stored and processed solar energy in its raw form to fuel their various abilities. And so it followed that their brains changed their functioning under a yellow sun too. The neurons eschewed slow chemical transmission methods and switched to photons whenever yellow sunlight was stored in the body. This meant that a powered Kryptonian could think at the speed of light. Thankfully, Kal had noted that it need not always be the case, he could consciously lower the speeds at which his brain functioned, and usually opted for a hundred times the speed of a human brain for whenever he lived as Clark Kent.

Looking at his cousin, who'd still not learned to control her mental speeds, he guessed that she'd absorbed everything in a span of a few seconds and her emotions were still processing the data.

Smiling warmly at the woman, he turned to Kal-Ex, "How much information, Kal-Ex?"

"The last few days of Krypton along with the complete Earth database, Kal-El."

"Oh. The complete database? Even the languages?"

"Yes sir, Mistress Kara was one of the leading experts in linguistics on Krypton."

 _That's remarkable!_ It had taken him more than an hour to learn all seven thousand of Earth's languages.

"Hello Kara, I guess you know who I am."

Kara smiled for the first time since he'd seen her.

"I do, baby Kal," she spoke in flawless English with a neutral accent. "You know, the last time I saw you, you were 3 months old. About this big."

She gestured with her hands to indicate a _tiny_ baby.

"I tried feeding you, but you decided it'd be more fun to throw up on me," Kara made a disgusted face, turning up her nose at the memory. "You were a very cute and bubbly baby, though. Aunt Lara swore to us that she could prove scientifically that you were the cutest baby on Krypton."

Thinking about Lara and the family that she'd lost, Kara's face involuntarily crumpled and she couldn't help herself as she let out her anguish. Kal sped over to her side and wrapped her in his arms as she sobbed, shedding tears for the billions of lives that would never live again.

Kal couldn't even begin to imagine her grief. He'd felt immense sadness all those years ago when he'd first learned of Krypton's demise, sadness for the parents he could never hug and his people that he'd never see. But he had absolutely no memories of Krypton, sometimes when he focused long and hard, he could almost see the face of his mother smiling down at him, but that was it. Krypton was for all purposes a myth to him. Not so for Kara, she'd lived out her childhood there, she'd had friends and family... his family! She'd lost everyone she'd ever known and loved.

"I'm so sorry, Kara, I wish I could protect you from this pain," he whispered into her hair as she soaked his armour with her tears.

Kal felt the most helpless he'd been in his entire life. He could never bear to see any woman cry, and he'd usually do whatever it took to console them. But now, he was faced with his only remaining family in the universe letting out her suffering in his arms and there was nothing he could do but hold her and let her heal in her own time. He understood that it would take her a long time to go back to normal, if at all. But he vowed to himself to be there with her every step of the way.

* * *

Bruce Wayne was fighting for his life. A large object came flying directly at his face and he ducked behind his cover. _So this is how the Batman dies. So be it._

He cautiously looked around the corner and saw his opponent standing there with an angry look on her face. He steeled himself and stood up.

"Sweety... uh... Selina," he amended as she glared at him. "Now I know that what I did was probably not the right thing."

He ducked as another expensive crystal bowl came flying at him from across the spacious kitchen.

"But you realize that I had to do it? Bruce Wayne could never be the devoted husband. I had to live up to my image, honey."

He came to a stop right in front of his pouting wife and lovingly took her hands in his (plus, he figured, she wouldn't try to kill him if her hands were occupied.)

She looked at him, unconvinced. "So you're telling me that your five-minute smooch with the hottest model on the Victoria's Secret catalogue was for the greater good?"

He nodded with a smile. _She understands me so well!_

"You're right Bruce. You're a true martyr. How do you sacrifice so much for the world?" she asked with a sad look on her face. She gave him a tight hug and he realized that something was wrong. _She's being too nice._

"It's really unfair to you, Bruce. So I've decided that I'm going to pull my weight in our relationship. I've decided to do exactly what you did for us so that I too can help keep our secret identities safe. I've had my eye on this Calvin Klein model for a while and he even asked me out a few weeks ago at Oliver's party. Maybe I should take him up on his offer," she looked thoughtful as she placed a kiss on Bruce's cheek and she sat down at a laptop on the kitchen counter. "Good talk, honey."

Bruce just stood there absently, with a hand on his cheek. _What the hell just happened?_

He turned as he heard the alarms indicating that Clark had entered the mouth of his cave network, and he invited Clark to join them upstairs. Bruce didn't feel like going down to the Batcave after having spent the night there tracking down the Penguin's whereabouts.

"Hey, Clark," Bruce waved and pushed out a stool for Clark alongside him and Selina.

"Clark! What a surprise!" Selina greeted him and gave him a hug. "How're Ma and Pa?" she asked. She'd met them the previous Christmas when he'd invited the League over for celebrations on the farm. She'd immediately taken to Martha and Jonathan, and they'd loved the feisty, independent woman. Jonathan had patted Bruce on the back with a wide smile, saying, "It's about time, son."

It was quite funny and touching at the same time how Clark's parents had pretty much ended up adopting the Leaguers. Clark couldn't have been prouder of his parents, most of the League had lost their own. Bruce had lost his parents when he was just 10 and had been cared for by Alfred, who was Bruce's father in all but name. Arthur had lost his father in an accident. Diana was exiled from Themyscira and currently wasn't on speaking terms with her mother, the Queen Hippolyta. It came as no surprise when Martha had fallen in love with the young warrior and fussed over her health the first time Clark had brought her home, Diana had been going through a mild bout of depression and had become quite thin. Martha ended up striking a deal with Diana and she now unfailingly dined with the Kents every Saturday night.

Growing up on the streets as an orphan, Selina wasn't used to trusting people. And yet, when she'd met the Kents, she'd become attached to them and Ma had revealed to Clark recently that Selina called her up every week to check up on her and Pa.

"They're doing well, Selina, Ma asked if you could swing by this weekend after the meeting," he replied.

Selina beamed, "Of course, Clark, I'll be there. What brings you here this morning? You're welcome any time of course, but I can see you have something on your mind."

"Yeah, well, remember how I told you guys I was the last Kryptonian in existence?"

Bruce and Selina nodded from their stools at the kitchen counter.

Clark paced in front of them, "I just found out that I have a cousin. Alive. And well."

Bruce looked at him, "You're going to have to run that by us again, Kent."

"My father Jor-El had a brother, Zor-El. When my dad discovered that Krypton was headed for an implosion, Zor and he worked together to build two ships, one each for each of their children. You see, a few centuries ago, after a devastating epidemic brought in from space wiped out fifteen percent of the population, the international government voted down all space exploration efforts. So Krypton's space-faring endeavours dwindled to nothing and our colonies were discontinued. But my dad was the lead scientist on the Government's panel, and he used his pull to take blueprints of small spaceships from the classified archives."

"So anyway, he and my uncle built two space ships, there was no time for more. But it turns out that Zor's ship malfunctioned and had to make multiple jumps through hyperspace instead of just the one that my ship made. That delayed Kara's ship and she reached Earth thirty-two years late. She was apparently supposed to take care of me on Earth as a baby," he suddenly chuckled. "She was only 21 when she went into hibernation. She's sore about the fact that I'm now older than her."

"That's quite a tale, Kent. Do you need any help?" Bruce asked.

Selina smacked him on the arm, "Bruce! What did I tell you about social cues?"

She walked over to Clark and gave him a hug.

"Clark, I know you were never alone here because you had the Kents and us, but I'm really, _really_ happy for you that you have family now that is just like you."

"Thank you, Sel," he smiled.

"Say, Clark, what do you think of me dating an underwear model?" she asked with a wink.

"Sounds like the best idea ever!" Clark replied with a grin, not knowing what was going on, but enjoying getting under Bruce's skin nonetheless.

Bruce just groaned. _Et Tu Kent?_


	3. Chapter C

**Six months after Kara's arrival on Earth**

Clark sighed contentedly as he rolled off his lover and lay back in bed, slightly out of breath and sweating heavily. Diana hummed with satisfaction and patted his chest, getting up to go clean herself.

Clark followed her with his eyes, unabashedly taking in her natural beauty. As beautiful as he'd always known she was, nothing could have prepared him for her raw sensuality and appeal. He felt himself get aroused again as he watched her bending over to pick up a hastily discarded undergarment, and he growled. She turned around at the sound, and squealed as he tackled her at super speed into the shower.

It was a good half hour later that they came back to the bed, wobbly legged and tired out.

"Kal, you are insatiable!"

"It's all your fault, princess."

They snuggled under the warm blankets, Kal wrapped his arms around her, and Diana laid her head on his shoulder, her raven hair tickling his nose.

"Not that I'm complaining, Di, quite the opposite in fact. But what brought this on? I thought that Amazons abstained from sexual pursuits?"

She trailed a circle on his chest, mulling over something for a long minute.

"I was in Iraq earlier today, tending to the refugees caught in the crossfire. I was trying to administer first aid to their wounded and directing them to the nearest safe location. And you know that we enjoy immunity from attack by either side since we don't interfere with their wars. So I let my guard down slightly, I was so occupied with my task that I never heard it coming until it was only a kilometre away. They launched an ICBM at me, Kal. Not a small surface to air missile, but an actual Ballistic Missile with a 50 kiloton warhead. I would be dead now if it weren't for the magic of my bracers, Kal. I was only able to save fifty of the refugees surrounding me. Two hundred and thirty-two died. A hundred and seventy-one of them were women and children."

The only sound in the room was the muted whirring of the ventilation system that supplied the underwater Fortress with an atmosphere.

"I've come close to death many times before, as you well know. And I've never had to fear anything, I had nothing to lose, I was happy to give my life to the cause. But for the first time, today, as I raised my bracers to shield myself not knowing whether I would survive the blast and the shrapnel, I found myself deeply saddened and only one face flashed before my eyes. At what I thought would be my final moment alive, I could only think of you."

Her hand on his chest stilled and she looked up at him. He was observing her with his loving eyes. "I'm done pretending, Kal. We've known each other for more than a decade now. It's time I stopped pretending that you don't mean anything to me. I... I love you, Kal-El. In all the ways a woman can love a man. And I wish to be yours if you'll have me."

Kal smiled at her and said softly, "Would you believe me if I told you I've been waiting to hear that since the day I met you? I love you too, my princess, and I will take you as mine if you take me to be yours."

She beamed up at him happily, but her face suddenly clouded and she smacked him on the chest.

"Ow! What was that for?"

"I never liked the idea of you bedding all those cheap women, and now I can finally tell you about it, Kal. Have you no shame? So many women, Kal!"

"It was hardly fift..." he cut himself off, catching Diana's glare. "You're not going to let this go, are you?" Clark asked, worriedly.

"Not a chance, Kal. I mean, Maxima? Really? What was she, like a freak in bed," she muttered, not particularly happy at the thought of that horrible telepath having been with Kal.

Hearing no reply from Kal, she smacked him once again.

"I don't care about what you were like before, Kal. But I have to warn you that Amazons are very possessive. And if I see you even looking at anyone else..." she left her threat hanging in the air.

Clark gulped, "Uh... understood, Diana." He stroked her face, "Hey, Di? You know you're the only one for me, right?"

She looked at him, "You incorrigible, honey-tongued man."

She pulled him down for a passionate kiss, and feeling him stir once again, swiftly straddled him.

"Do you know that I was once given the title of Themyscira's best horse rider, Kal?"

Kal looked up appreciatively at her glistening mounds swaying above him. He managed to shake his head, no, he didn't know that.

"Let me show you why I got that title, Kal," she moaned, grinding her hips, and he could only graciously agree.

It was many hours later that the two finally went to sleep, passing out from exhaustion. They were awoken just half an hour later by alarms blaring from the Fortress' Communications room. Warriors, the two of them, they were instantly awake and sped to the computers in less than a second. Clark swiftly monitored his satellite feeds and his sensor arrays. Whatever it was, the news channels had yet to pick it up.

Clark paled, and turned to Diana. She had the same ashen look on her face.

"Antimatter bomb," he whispered.

She nodded, "I'm gonna need the suit."

As Diana went for her suit, he alerted Kara, who was currently staying with his parents in Smallville. He requested her to meet him at the coordinates. He sent out a communiqué to the news networks and the UN, requesting the US Mainland to be put on high alert.

Diana approached him, wearing a suit that he'd created for her. It was much like his and Kara's armoured body suit, except it was coloured a midnight blue and she wore her Themysciran armour over it. And a good thing too. It would have caused an international outcry if she had gone around in a suit that clung to all of her perilous curves. Invisible force fields would protect her face and exposed hands, protecting her physiology from radiation or allowing her to survive in space or an alien atmosphere. He discarded his clothes and activated his own suit.

* * *

 **Yellowstone National Park, somewhere above North Western Wyoming**

 **6 seconds after the explosion**

They teleported in a kilometre away from the blast area, joined by Kara a few milliseconds later. In less than a microsecond, Clark surveyed the area and using their telepathic communicators, conveyed his thoughts to Diana and his cousin. There was no time for real time conversation now. The bombers were smart. The antimatter warhead by itself was of little threat, it was very low yield and wouldn't affect more than a few dozen square kilometres of uninhabited land. But the intentions behind the placement of the bomb was obvious to them both. The Yellowstone Caldera. The super volcano that lay just beneath the surface of the National Park. The magma chamber lay just five kilometres beneath the surface and Clark and Kara both ran simulations in their minds that told them that the bomb would easily have vaporized the crust, destabilizing the volcano.

The real danger of the volcano, they knew, lay in the gases and not the lava. The lava flows were manageable, Clark's and Kara's bio-electric fields could survive the millions of degrees of the sun's corona, so a few thousand degrees of molten lava was chump change, and at most they'd have to dig up a trench to direct the flow away from human settlements, of which there were thankfully few around. But the gases, however, were a different story. At the superheated, high pressures beneath the surface, say at more than six kilometres down, the gases like water vapour and carbon dioxide are dissolved in the molten magma, constituting just 5-10% of the magma by volume. But if they rose to the surface or if anything caused the pressures beneath the surface to ease, the gases would return to their gaseous state, dramatically increasing their volume to more than 75% of the magma, pushing the layers above outward. The gases would keep expanding and pushing against the rock above until the outward pressure reached a breaking point, leading to a volcanic eruption the likes of which the modern human had never seen.

Taking another sub surface survey of the magma reservoir using his vision, Clark ran a quick simulation in his head. When the magma finally burst through and exploded, the superheated gas would pulverize close to thousand two hundred cubic kilometres of rock and turn it into a fast moving debris cloud. Imagine a giant cube of solid rock with each side measuring thirty-five kilometres long; now break it up into toxic dust, rocks, and sharp glass and spread it out over thousands of kilometres. That's basically your Yellowstone super volcano. The ash cloud, which would shoot up to heights of more than fifty kilometres, would reach as far east as New York, coating it with a layer of ash a few millimetres deep, which would be more than enough to play havoc with the electrical grid and the crops. For cities and towns that were much closer, the effects would be _far_ more devastating, and the fatalities, incalculable. This was, of course, not considering the impact of the ash on global climate change, which would be impossible to predict. The 1883 explosion of Krakatoa was a thousand times smaller than this explosion would potentially be, and _that_ eruption caused a sound wave that was heard thousands of miles away, the pressure wave from the blast circling the planet _four_ times.

The bomb had already vaporized most of the rock directly above the centre of the magma reservoir, drastically decreasing the pressure inside and causing the water in the magma to bubble up and expand. Clark knew he had minutes before the situation turned unsalvageable. Letting the volcano explode unimpeded would be catastrophic. He discussed his final plan telepathically with Kara, their thoughts flowing with ease at light speed, and saw that she too had come to a similar conclusion. He instructed the Fortress to teleport two thousand interdimensional projectors to his coordinates. Moving now at Mach 300, Diana's top speed, they set up a perimeter around the entire Yellowstone caldera, some eight hundred square kilometres, with the trio working in tandem using their telepathic communicators and a direct uplink to the Fortress. They put up repeaters at regular intervals around the perimeter and Clark activated the system, watching the projectors pulse with energy and connect to each other, forming a hemispherical dome around the caldera.

Kara, who'd kept one eye on the magma chamber, saw it swell dramatically.

"Diana! Get back!"

She tackled Diana away from the explosion and Kal finished up the final section of the perimeter just as the shockwave reached it.

The trio watched the spectacle unfold beneath them with a respectful silence. The sheer scale of the natural event stunned them. The surface of the caldera finally collapsed in on itself and the volcano exploded, throwing out a thousand billion tons of material. Thankfully for the continental United States, the material simply passed through the Kryptonian projectors, a thinly walled bubble that surrounded the caldera, transporting the material through the dimensions and dumping it in a cosmic wasteland. A few earthquakes erupted in the surrounding region, but apart from that, little damage was caused. They all heaved sighs of relief. Clark and Kara brought their thinking speeds back down to a few hundred times that of a human, the level at which Diana's thought speeds usually were.

"That was close," Diana mused.

"Yes, Kal," Kara agreed. "I've never understood the League's policy of non-interference with world events, but after this incident, it has become even more nonsensical to me. Someone had enough time, resources and manpower to make that amount of anti-matter, weaponize it, and almost succeed in destroying the most powerful country on the planet. The only reason today didn't turn out darkly was that they didn't know about our projectors. You realize that, without the projectors, even with our powers the three of us couldn't have stopped the pyroclastic flow?"

"Yes, I know, Kara. I've been giving thought to the non-interference policy too."

Diana looked at him in surprise, "Kal... I..."

"No, Diana, you were right in telling me about your incident earlier today. We're walking around with our eyes closed. It's time we took matters into our hands. We've let the deaths and destruction and madness go on for far too long."

Diana nodded, agreeing, "Yes. I too have found my thoughts straying there far too often these past few years."

They lapsed into silence, watching the giant maws of the earth spew flame and ash into interdimensional space. They didn't know what the future held for them. But whatever it was, they knew that their actions from this point onwards would reshape the course of future history.


	4. Chapter D

**Fortress of Solitude - Level 0**

 **One Day after the Volcano**

"Are you sure about this Kal? You've opened up your heart to me and welcomed me to this planet. I feel like I'd be imposing on you if I took up space in your home too. I've disturbed the Kents enough as it is," Kara said worriedly, as they floated down through the forcefield at the top entrance of Kal's underwater Fortress.

"Nonsense, Kara. Look," he said, as they landed on the tarmac half a kilometre beneath the roof, gently putting a hand on her shoulder. "I know this planet doesn't feel like home yet, and I understand that. It's going to take you time to get used to this society. But you're the only family I have, Kara. We're all that's left of Krypton. I would _gladly_ give you everything I've ever collected and owned if it meant that you'd be happy. Compared to that, giving you full access to the Fortress is nothing, okay?" he asked her, softly.

She nodded, tears glistening in her eyes.

"You might look like Jor-El, Kal, but your heart, it's Lara through and through," Kara told him in a husky voice. "Alright, cousin, you've convinced me, now show me this Fortress of yours," she said, reining in her emotions.

"Glad you asked," Kal grinned.

"You've seen this level before, the Aviation Bay. It's the size of fifty football fields — you remember that sport we went to watch last week? — and houses all of our cruisers. They're all automatically operated, of course, they have routine missions around the galaxy and ninety-eight percent of it happens without my supervision. I only have to step in if the cruisers need to operate in a hostile sector."

"What types of cruisers do you... we," she amended at his look, "have, Kal?"

"I'm building more over time, but right now our primary ones are twenty-five medium sized battle ships. Umm... ah, there they are," he pointed to a row of sleek spaceships, each standing at ten metres tall and sixty metres long.

"Weaponry?" asked Kara, a keen tactician.

"High power lasers and phasers mostly. The ships are powered by dwarf star matter, quite standard. Oh, but their shields run on a different subsystem, a neutron star core, they are absolutely impenetrable. Even the two of us together would have little chance of breaking it apart. I had the chance to visit a neutron star a few Earth years ago, and I spent 5 months in relativistic time harvesting its core," he grinned, gesturing at the ship, "Totally worth it. The ships also each have a weaponized version of the phantom zone projector. I'll send you the details of all the cruisers after the meeting tonight. I usually send out this particular class of cruisers to most skirmishes or battles, they're more than adequate. The only time I've ever seen them have any trouble is when they're faced with an Apokoliptian heavy cruiser or a magic based civilization. Which then brings me to our one and only heavy battle ship. Kal pointed to a corner of the large hangar and Kara noticed, to her slight surprise, a stealth panel embedded second platform, four hundred metres below the roof. They floated up to the platform and Kara held her breath.

"Kal, she's beautiful!" she gushed. "Did you design this yourself?" she asked.

"Yup," he replied proudly. They were looking at an enormous ship, of a size that almost defied logic. At a good one kilometre in length and a quarter of one in height and width, it was armed to the teeth with the deadliest of Kryptonian weaponry.

"I might be a little biased, but this right here is probably the most powerful ship in all of the known galaxies, the very pinnacle of Kryptonian engineering. I've never gotten the chance to take her out for a spin," he said ruefully. "Maybe the two of us could try her out someday. I even managed to add the grav system since there was more than enough space inside. I think it's possible that we can actually visit the other galaxy clusters now with this baby."

Kara raised her eyebrows in surprise, no civilisation in the thousands of populated galaxies in their own cluster had ever managed to travel to another cluster of galaxies. You see, when the Big Bang happened and the galaxies of stars formed, there were two main forces, the explosion that pushed everything apart and gravity which pulled things together. What eventually happened was that gravity brought together millions of galaxies and gave rise to many so called super clusters. But the universe expanding due to the Big Bang meant that the intergalactic space between these super clusters was almost impossible to cross since they were moving away from each other at near light speeds. It would be a miracle indeed if this ship could let them visit another super cluster.

They spent close to an hour in the aviation bay, Clark showing her all the types of ships they'd be relying on for their various missions.

They got onto an elevator platform and Clark entered Level 39 in the interface.

"How many levels are there, Kal?" Kara asked.

"As many as we need," he stated.

She looked at him, confused, and he explained.

"Inter dimensional tech. You saw how large the Aviation Bay was, right? But the rest of the levels are hardly that big. I wrapped the fourth spatial dimension around on the levels where we need more space. Similarly, we can also go as deep as we can possibly want to without having to drill into the Earth's mantle. Here's another surprise for you," he said and he gestured for her to step off the platform.

She blinked as the familiar insignia of the Justice League lay embossed on the wall in front of them. "Kal, what...?"

"Shh," he quieted her doubts and led her into the room. She suddenly realised that she was in the main work area of the Hall of Justice. She could see the League's human staff busy with their paperwork and she spotted the Green Arrow at the far end of the room. The sun was shining through the windows and she could see the Washington Monument in the distance.

"Let me guess, fourth dimension engineering?" she asked.

Kal nodded, with a grin on his face.

"It pisses Bruce off to no end because he doesn't get how the Hall of Justice is substantially bigger on the inside than the outside. Most of the League's facilities are actually housed inside the Fortress, Kara, and many Leaguers and the staff routinely work a few kilometres beneath the surface of the Arctic even though they never know it. Even Diana doesn't understand how the Fortress works or where it is, and I intend to keep things that way," he looked at her meaningfully.

"I understand, Kal," she replied thoughtfully. "Even though the Leaguers are close friends and people we love, we all have different missions and loyalties, and the only person we can completely trust with this knowledge is another Kryptonian of the El family. Don't worry, Kal, our secrets are safe with me."

They wrapped up their tour pretty quickly after that, with Kal giving her half the floors of his personal Fortress space, with the blessing to remodel things according to her liking.

"I'm glad that we share the same home now, Kara. But remember, we will still spend most of our time at Smallville with Ma and Pa, okay? I don't want to see you isolate yourself here."

"Of course, Kal. If I have to be honest, even though I know there's no chance of the walls being breached, I still feel nervous about all that water surrounding us."

Clark chuckled, "It took me ten years to shake off that feeling."

"Don't worry about me, dear cousin," Kara replied. "Since I'm _way_ better than you at... well... everything, I'm sure I'll be fine in a few days."

Clark smirked, "We shall see, Kara Zor-El, we shall see."

"When are we meeting the League?" she asked.

Kal looked down at his wrist interface, "Uh... yup, they're all coming to the Hall in around two hours."

"Oh? Good luck, Kal. I'm not yet used to open displays of affection, but..." she hugged him. "I just want you to know that I'm here for you too. Just be sure of yourself, you might meet a lot of resistance initially but you have to remember at that point that they think differently from us, so it's up to us to patiently convince them."

Kal smiled and nodded, "Thanks, Kara. I'll keep that in mind. Wow, I guess it looks like you have some use after all!" he joked, receiving a well-placed punch in his bicep for his troubles.

"Ow! What _is_ it with you and Diana and the punching?" he muttered as he held his bicep gingerly.

* * *

 **Hall of Justice**

 **One hour later**

Clark descended to Level 39 and stepped through to the Hall of Justice. The day staff had all left, and the senior Leaguers were just starting to arrive. A few feet away from him, Bruce and Zatanna were deep in conversation and they jumped as Clark materialised from the wall.

"Goddamit Kent, one of these days..." Bruce muttered as he walked over and touched the solid wall behind Clark.

Clark smirked at him and greeted Zatanna with a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

"Good to see you, Zee. It's been a while, I hear you've been quite busy these days?"

Zatanna Zatara, one of the League's most prolific magicians, nodded, "Circe again. There seems to be no stopping her," she frowned.

"We'll figure it out, Zee. That's one of the things I wished to talk about today."

He excused himself from the two and walked over to where Diana, Mera, and Arthur were in deep conversation. He politely joined them without interrupting Mera, who was talking about the exponential increase in the death of sea life following a recent trade deal between Eastern Asian countries.

Diana smiled at him and wrapped an arm around him as they continued the conversation.

Arthur lifted an eyebrow at the two, "I know that you two have always been quite close, but," he gestured between them, "I sense that something has changed?"

Mera gasped, "Diana, this is wonderful news!"

Diana smiled at the Atlantian royal couple. "Let's just say we came to our senses," she said, leaning into Kal.

* * *

 **Conference Room D**

 **Thirty minutes later**

The senior Leaguers had finally gathered together in the room and they all sat at the large, circular table. Kara was chatting up a storm with her new best friend Shazam. The Flash, Wally West, was unsuccessfully trying to wrangle a phone number from Donna, Diana's younger sister. Arthur and Mera were huddled together, whispering to themselves in the manner of a couple completely enamoured with each other. Bruce and Selina sat next to them, with the Batman uncharacteristically chuckling as Selina described something to him with her brand of sarcastic wit. J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter, sat next to Diana, conversing with her, no doubt asking her about the recent developments in her romantic life. J'onn might look like one who is not much taken with the idea of romance, but he was a total sucker for stories of the heart. Diana and Clark were among the very few who knew of his marriage to Lois Lane. The feisty reporter and the Martian had met when J'onn had impersonated and covered for Clark at The Daily Planet, almost a decade ago now. The second Green Lantern on Earth, Hal Jordan, was describing the physical attributes of a certain supermodel he'd met the previous day to an overeager Green Arrow, the billionaire Oliver Queen. Unfortunately for Oliver, their discreet conversation didn't go unnoticed and he turned to deal with an irate Black Canary.

Clark walked into the room and took his chair at the table, between Diana and Kara. He'd been the Chairman of the Justice League right from its inception twelve years ago, and one of his only conditions had been that while he'd act as the leader in situations where it was necessary, the interactions within the team strictly had to be on equal footing. Defense forces imports like Hal and Shayera found this lack of hierarchy odd, but the team grew to appreciate working in an all inclusive environment.

Shayera was scheduled to be the convener for the day's meeting and she called for everyone's attention, resorting to a slight tap of her Nth metal mace on the cool surface of the table when Wally didn't seem to have heard her.

"I know this is a scheduled meeting and that we have a lot of routine work to get through, and we will get to that. But I think we better start off with the question that's on everyone's mind. Superman. Wonderwoman. You guys have a lot to answer for," Shayera stated, with a serious look. There was a pin drop silence in the room. No one moved.

"Are you guys hooking up, or not?"

Clark laughed outright, and shrugged, "I can neither confirm nor deny that. But I _will_ say that, if we were, I'd be the happiest guy in the world."

Diana chuckled, "Yes, Shayera, Kal and I are indeed sharing a bed."

Wally let out a dramatic gasp, "Big blue, you sly dog! First, you got Ivy, then Maxima, now Wonderwoman. Way to go bud... ooofff," he grunted as Donna drove an elbow into his stomach, leaving him winded.

Diana looked borderline murderous and Clark, the poor guy, was sweating.

"Poison Ivy, Kal?" she whispered low enough so that only he and a bemused Kara could hear it. "We'll be talking about this tonight."

Clark smiled weakly, "Thank you, Wally, for that." Everyone chuckled at the sheepish look on Wally's face.

The meeting went on to settle all pending issues over the next hour and a half and Shayera finally opened up the floor to the Chairman.

Clark spoke. "I'm going to ask you all today to make a serious decision. And I'm going to be upfront about the gravity of the issue," the Leaguers had come to know their friend well, and recognized the seriousness on his face. This was his rare Superman face, the one that he used only when he was facing a murderous criminal or when he was dealing with a really ambiguous moral dilemma.

"This decision that you'll be making today will affect the future of the Earth and the entire human race. We will only proceed to the next stage if we have a unanimous vote. This time, we're not going to rely on a majority, I want each of you to be on board before we advance. Finally, you're all going to learn a few things about the nature of your existence that might distress you. I sincerely apologize if that's the case. Feel free to stop me at any point to ask questions."

He continued, "You all must have heard about the Yellowstone incident yesterday. The UN and the US government have played it quiet, but as things stood yesterday, if the events had gone slightly off course, the entire continental United States would be covered by an ash cloud today. An antimatter bomb was dropped on the super volcano underneath Yellowstone and it ended up exploding."

Dinah cut in, "It exploded? But how...?"

"Kara, Diana, and I were lucky enough to get there seconds after the bomb went off and we were able to transport the exploded material away from the area."

"Wait," Bruce said, ever the shrewd detective. "Let me get this right, Kent. I've evaluated Yellowstone before. And I know for a fact that if it exploded, it would throw out hundreds of billions of tons of rock. And as strong and fast as the three of you are, I doubt it's physically possible for the pyroclastic flow to be stopped."

"You're right, Bruce. The only reason we managed it was because we teleported the debris away through the dimensions. You all know the teleporting equipment I installed in the Hall about seven years ago. The League uses it to get to locations across the planet, and I told you that it had the limited range of Earth and could only teleport people. I apologise for withholding information from you all. The technology I developed could, at its full potential, transport any amount of material to any location in our super cluster. It's how my ships have been handling conflicts across the cluster," he looked at Hal, seeing the understanding dawn in the Green Lantern's eyes. Oa had great technology to beam their Lanter Corps across large distances, but even it couldn't manage to port a large space ship, and it had been a subject of great debate when Kryptonian ships had turned up at the far corners of the cluster.

"The reason I withheld that information, and a whole lot more, was because I have always been cautious of exposing the human civilisation and other young civilizations to the knowledge of an advanced race. I've always wanted you to develop on your own. But before we go any further, I think it's time to explain a few things about life in our cluster. Now, I didn't actually know about these things prior to Kara's arrival six months ago. Kara, do you mind?"

"Not at all, Kal," she leaned forward in her chair. "Hal Jordan, seeing that you have access to intergalactic knowledge, would you mind summing up what we know about Krypton?" she requested.

"I don't see why not. Krypton was an advanced race of humanoids a few hundred million years old. They grew technologically superior. The genetically engineered themselves to great potential, but a tragedy on one of their exploratory space missions caused them to close off their society, banning all space flight. As a result, they couldn't escape or be rescued when their planet exploded. There are only two known survivors till date, and both are in this very room."

"Excellent, thank you, Hal. Except...," she paused, looking into each Leaguer's eyes. "What if I told you that was a fabrication? The Kryptonian race wasn't a few hundred million years old when it perished. It was thirteen _billion_ years old. Kryptonians are the oldest known race in our cluster. Let me explain," she gestured to Hal, seeing that he looked dubious.

"Around a billion years or so after the Big Bang, the first signs of life came into being on Krypton, a planet much like Earth. They were the product of natural forces coming together to create accidental life. Intelligent species evolved on Krypton many hundreds of millions of years later and thrived on the lush planet, with plenty of resources and food to spare. They reached the level of current human technology a few hundreds of thousands of years after their intelligence arose, and they continued developing over the course of billions of years. They discovered ways to bend the universe around them to their will and became masters of space-time. They harnessed stars, black holes, and entire galaxies, and spread throughout our cluster. They seeded life where they went and new civilizations popped up in their image. They cultivated alien races where they found them and ensured that they would survive. By this time, they'd engineered unimaginable powers into their own bodies and were capable of astonishing feats, and were practically immortal.

Kan-El, one of our distant ancestors, noticed that Kryptonians were interfering with life throughout the universe and spent a few thousand years trying to gather every existing Kryptonian at the site of their birth, the planet Krypton. This was one and a half billion years ago. They had an intense, years long debate about their effects on the universe and the majority of the Kryptonian population, all aged billions of years and exceptionally wise by then, agreed that they needed to change the way things worked. They agreed to settle on their home planet, and convert their yellow sun to a red one, limiting their own powers, understanding but accepting that they would die without them. They chose to procreate and live as a normal race. In the millions of years that followed in Krypton's history, the memories of their powers and their legacy as a spacefaring and life-seeding race were forgotten and they lived under a false truth, their ancestors having sacrificed their gifts to let the universe develop at its own pace. This, unfortunately, led to their destruction as you all know, they perished like any other vulnerable race, with no knowledge of their history. Although I do have to add, due to the billion and a half year period of no Kryptonian using their powers, their gifts were watered down by a magnitude of a few hundred million. So the powers Kal and I possess are absolutely inconsequential compared to those of the original Kryptonians."

She paused, letting everyone digest the story, even Diana was hearing this for the first time. Kal looked positively taken aback even though he knew every word of it and had heard it a dozen times from Kara. It was just one of those incomprehensible tales that required a rewiring of your thinking.

"Aha! Wait, wait, wait," Shazam suddenly spoke, finding a loophole in the story, "The gods," he said. "They created us! Not Kryptonians."

"True," Kara smiled. "Kryptonians didn't create humans. Your Gods did, but..." she left her sentence open.

Batman finished the thought for her, "But who created the Gods?"

"This can't be right," Zatanna spoke up. "What about the other forces in the universe, what about magic? Now don't tell me the Kryptonians could do magic too."

"Zee," Clark replied to her. "I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but let me explain magic to you."

"Bruce, Oliver," he addressed the two vigilantes, "the two of you are wealthy investors. What is the most promising field today in innovative technology?"

"Human augmentation and biological enhancement," Oliver replied, and Bruce nodded, agreeing, he could see the point Kal was going to make.

Kal said, "Even with the limited technology at the disposal of the humans, they're already trying to incorporate it into their bodies. And technologically advanced humans are just a few _centuries_ old. Imagine races that might have had billions of years to develop. Anything that their science can achieve, they would have incorporated into their own bodies. So, magic? It's just clever engineering. The Homo Magi, your species, are descended from the Gods, who were, in turn, descended from the ancient Kryptonians."

"So magic was one of the powers of the Kryptonians?" Zatanna clarified.

"I guess, but they wouldn't have termed it magic since they would have understood exactly how it worked. They would have engineered the features into their own bodies," Kal replied.

J'onn spoke up, with a quiet voice, "Are you and Kara the most powerful beings in the cluster then?"

Kal shook his head, "Not even close. While the original Kryptonians were peerless, our civilization let those abilities become watered down by not using them. But the other civilizations which had been nurtured or descended from the ancient Kryptonians didn't do the same. As a result, some species became very powerful, and we'd have no hope of beating them."

"So, theoretically, the Greek Gods could defeat you or Kara?" Bruce asked him.

"In a one on one fight? Oh, they could smack us up and down the galaxy easily," Clark replied.

"You don't seem too concerned about that, Clark," Bruce noted.

"Not at all. I'm just as concerned about them as you are about bullets or bombs puncturing your skin. You rely on technology to protect yourself, so do I. They'll never dare to touch me or Kara, even pre-emptively, because I'd engineered Nth metal warheads and I let them know about it along with the fact that I can port to Olympus' dimension at will. Ares has been trying to find my Fortress for the past seven years by the way. He's no closer to finding it, nor will he ever be."

"Wait a minute!" Wally said. "You said that over the billion and a half years after the Kryptonians settled under the red sun, your species forgot about what happened before. But then, how do you two know about it?"

"If you remember my story, it was one of our distant ancestors, Kan-El that called together the meeting that led to the decision to stay on Krypton and give up their powers. It was decided that our history couldn't be completely erased and had to be preserved, and the honour of carrying that knowledge went to the El family, and the descendants of Kan-El have since borne the story of our race," Kara replied.

"Who else knows about this?" Arthur asked.

"As I said," Kara replied, gesturing between her and Kal, "only the El family carries this knowledge, I told Kal this a few months back, and now I've told all of you too. Not even the most powerful beings alive know this truth. Except maybe that weird floating chair guy, but I'm not quite sure."

Dinah spoke up, "While we're certainly gratified that you two would share something of such value with us, I'm guessing that there's more to it?"

Clark nodded, "I needed you all to know the history of my race before I propose my next course of action for a vote."

"Removing our policy of non-interference," he said, seeing the members react instantaneously. He could see their minds churning as they dug into their ideological corners deeply, they wouldn't budge without a fight. 'Good,' Clark mused, he expected nothing less from the most honourable people he'd had the pleasure of ever meeting.

 _This should be a fun exercise._


	5. Chapter E

A.N: I love detail. So I'm going to be upfront about it and admit that to you. I'm going to unabashedly build up the world with the smallest of details. But that said, I'm in love with the pairing of Clark and Diana, and I _love_ writing the other characters. I'm not going to miss out on the human element of the story; it might become boring to read _and_ write otherwise. I apologize if the flow of the story is uneven, but I plan to continue this for a long time, and I assure you that the writing will even out. I 've been getting good reviews and responses, which let me know what I'm doing right. I'm also getting crassly worded insults, which are also very helpful in letting me know what's wrong, although the wording could be a little polite. After all, aren't we all here to support and encourage each other? :)

* * *

 **Kandor Island**

 **Seven Months Later**

Bruce brought his civilian VTOL jet to a gentle stop atop one of the landing pads on the island and let his pilot take over the after landing procedures and radio call-ins. _Ain't nobody got time fo dat! Damn, that stupid meme is stuck in my head. I wish Selina hadn't shown it to me._

Although he didn't let it show on his face, he gazed around the small island in wonder. It was located smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in international waters and looked like a Mediterranean dream. When Kent had finally gotten through the League after days of group and individual sessions, Bruce had been worried that Clark would continue to exhibit the same trust with the world, naively trying to tell them what he was about to do. But no such thing happened. The first thing Kara and he had proposed to the public was a plan to take down cancer without having to resort to modifying the human genome, which was apparently a simple task through Kryptonian technology. No, they wanted to this to happen through a normal non-invasive procedure which would preserve the human DNA but rid the patient of existing or any future chances of cancer. The public, of course, fell in love with the idea, and having observed Superman's work for the last decade and a half, they certainly trusted him enough to let him start and operate his own company to conduct research and make his techniques available worldwide. They were happier when they found out that the new organization would not be attached to any single country; this also eased the fears of many Eastern governments.

Bruce figured the island must be around fifty kilometres in diameter. It was mostly covered by a young rain forest that looked years old rather than the few months it really was, the entire island was created very recently. An unbroken string of beaches that could stir envy in a Frenchman ran around the circumference of it. The only infrastructure he could see was a cluster of Graeco-Roman type buildings set a few kilometres away from the small airport. Clark had been taken by Themysciran architecture the first time he'd visited the Amazonian nation five years ago when Hippolyta had invited him and Diana to a celebration. When the plans for the Kandor island were finalized, Clark had gone back to Diana's home, visiting Hippolyta to request the services of the Themysciran chief architect, Timandra. Of course, he'd had to brave Hippolyta's threats detailing what she would do to Clark if he hurt Diana since they were in a relationship, but Clark had told Bruce that it was worth it, "Just wait till you see the island." He hadn't been exaggerating the little isle's beauty.

He heard slight gasps as he walked into the main building, which was made of white marble and easily rivalled the size of Wayne Manor, which was no slouch itself, a tour group was visiting the island and were pleasantly surprised to see the famous Gotham city billionaire casually strolling in. He waved at the receptionist, giving her his well practised — far too well practised, he heard his wife's voice in his head say — playboy smile, and entered the luxurious elevator cabin.

Clark was in the midst of an innocent goodbye kiss-turned-steamy makeout session with Diana on his desk when Bruce walked into the offices.

Smirking, he cleared his throat lightly, and the two burst apart, blushing fiercely. They straightened their clothes, and Kal spoke in a squeaky voice, "Bruce!"

He cleared his throat, "Bruce, it's good to see you. Diana was the just leaving, she's late for a meeting at the embassy."

"Yes, I am _now_ , no thanks to you, Kal! Bruce, it's wonderful to see you as always. We are still going on a double date this Saturday, are we not?"

Bruce nodded, "Selina was enthused to hear about it, I bought this new restaurant in uptown Florence that we can go to. I'll have it closed to the public so you two won't have to be in disguise."

"Thank you, Bruce," she smiled, and with a lingering final kiss to Clark, she teleported away, her atoms and molecules dematerializing from view.

"So, I guess everything is going well with the relationship?" Bruce asked with a grin.

Clark smiled, "It was touch and go there for a bit, I was in the doghouse when she found out about Zatanna and Lashina, but we're fine now. She trusts me."

Bruce nodded, even he'd been pissed with Clark nine years ago when Zee had let it slip to the Batman that she and the Kryptonian had gotten into a relationship. Against Bruce's expectations, the two had gone on to have a remarkably successful, albeit secret, four-year relationship, parting ways amicably when they realized that even for all the passion between them, they would be better suited as good friends. Clark considered Zatanna his closest friend after Bruce and Diana.

"Anyway," Clark said, "I could have shown you around the island virtually. The reason I called you over is because Kara and I have a gift for you!" Clark led him out of his office and down the corridor.

"Where is Kara anyway?" Bruce asked, walking beside his friend.

"Oh, she's setting up the space station. She wanted to do the construction herself, she's new to engineering and said she needed the practice," Clark replied.

They walked through a doorway protected by a shimmering force field. There was only one object in the brightly lit, clinically white tiled room. A large cylindrical dome around ten feet high stood in the middle. A comically large, red button was set prominently on its side.

"Go on, push the button," Clark encouraged Bruce, and it was all the latter could do to prevent rolling his eyes. Clark had always been prone to bursts of dramatic flair.

Bruce pushed down a sarcastic farm boy Clark quip and did as he was asked. The metallic dome slowly dissolved into the red button and the button itself floated away. There was nothing inside.

"Haha, Kent. Very funny," Bruce remarked drolly.

Clark smiled and typed something into the interface at his wrist, and a body suit slowly emerged into sight right in front of Bruce. _Stealth tech._ It took no guessing to figure out the person for whom the suit was intended. Shaded a midnight black, it was so dark that it seemed to have no light reflecting off of it. The only reason he was able to see it at all was that it was outlined against the stark whiteness of the room. It was as sleek and thin as the Kryptonian armour suits that Kara and Kal wore, no more than a few millimetres thick. The Bat cowl was seamlessly built into the fabric of the suit and retained the armoured look that Bruce so loved. The cape hung behind the suit and had a metallic sheen to it. If he knew Clark well, and he did by now...

"Nth metal?" he guessed and looked at his Kryptonian friend, who seemed pleasantly surprised.

Clark nodded, "I've been using the metal in my cape for the last few years. It protects against magic, and in your case also allows you to fly."

"You mean glide?" Bruce asked.

Clark shook his head, "Unrestrained flight. The Nth metal has a property that when properly engineered allows the user to negate gravity. I've designed the suit so that you can control your flight, at least until you develop a mental link with the suit, with your um... butt muscles," he explained, a trifle sheepishly.

Bruce turned to him, incredulous, "My ass? Whatever for?"

"You see, after I built the feature into the suit, I remembered that when you fight, you don't stick to a single martial arts form since you know _hundreds_ of them. So I couldn't determine any other muscle group to link to the suit's flight capability without compromising your fighting form. But that said, we'll test it out today and you can spar with me in mid air, I'll customize it however you want."

"What else can it do?" Bruce asked, his initial scepticism gone, replaced by growing enthusiasm.

"Well, let's see... it's completely bullet proof, it has no trouble with any calibre made of any element or alloy. It can also handle most bombs and missiles without harming you in the slightest. One funny thing is that the suit material is quite fragile, it has to be to be so thin. The reason it's impenetrable is that I weaved a minuscule fragment of dwarf star core into your suit, and used it to power a force field that extends a few inches from the surface of your body. I've set the default power to dampening because if the force field is too strong, any bullets that come your way can ricochet away from you and hit the people you're trying to help. I've also installed a telepathy enabled communicator inside the cowl. I'm going to upgrade the League's communicators to allow us all to talk to each other through only our thoughts in battle."

Bruce interrupted, "You mean the communicators read our brain waves and then convert it to radio?" Bruce's company was actually working on such a model and had made remarkable progress.

Clark shook his head, "That was my initial plan, but it was an inefficient process with too much loss. This actually works by connecting two brains together through a direct neural link. It sets up an intermediate server through Quantum entanglement, and the two brains interact with the server in real-time," he added by way of explanation.

"The forcefield also completely covers and seals your face, by the way, so you should be able to easily survive in outer space for around ten days, or indefinitely on another planet. Kara helped me design a small module powered by the core that'll filter out or produce oxygen from most gases you'd find in any atmosphere. What else is there...? Hmm, ah yes. I know you hate enhancements, but I indulged myself and installed a shock glove into the suit," he shrugged. "I didn't think you'd complain about that."

They messed around with the suit for the next twenty minutes. Bruce tested out the suit's flight capabilities and grudgingly admitted that the butt muscle control was a good call. He also managed to talk the newly tech-generous Clark into upgrading the Batmobile and the Batjet with Kryptonian tech.

"Is that a goddamn heated pond?!" Bruce exclaimed as Clark took him on an aerial tour of the island, pointing out the research buildings and the earmarked areas for the factories.

"Well, Diana thought it'd be a good idea, so..."

"You lucky bastard, I can't believe you actually had me worried about your finances for a few years back there."

"Well, to be fair, I did tell you not to worry, but you were all like," he imitated Batman's gruff voice, "Kent, you're a hayseed, how could you survive without your reporter's salary? I'M BATMAN!"

"I do not say that! Okay, _when_ have I said that? You know what, never mind. I went to this kindergarten school opening the other day, and the kids all tried to imitate me. Guess what they were shouting in their squeaky, little voices?" he sighed and shook his head. "It's becoming hopeless. I'm going too soft."

"Hey," Clark stopped their flight and turned to Batman, floating a kilometre above the island. "I know you had to be tough on yourself when you started this. That was the only way you could survive in a world of metas and beat them, by having laser sharp focus and training yourself to the point of punishment. But that's not the case now," he gestured to the suit. "You're practically meta now. It's alright if you ease up on yourself down a little, Bruce."

"I know, Kent, I know. I somehow realized when we took flight that _that_ was your main reason for giving me the suit. And... uh... thank you doesn't cut it. Not for the suit. But for, you know..." he gestured vaguely.

"I know," Clark smiled, and deciding not to embarrass the man he considered his brother any further, he wrapped up the tour, leaving Bruce with the suit and a wrist interface.

"What's this for?" Bruce asked, putting on the thin band around his left wrist over his body suit.

"PUSH THE BUTTON!" Clark shouted, floating away.

Bruce rolled his eyes and did so, watching in slack jawed surprise as a sleek aircraft revealed itself right in front of him, switching off its stealth panelling. He laughed delightedly. The craft was coloured a midnight black and shaped like a... well... you know what it was shaped like.


	6. Chapter F

A.N: I'm working on a timeline for the AU that I'm building here. I'll be dating the story when I update next.

* * *

 **New Delhi, India**

 **Eight Months after the Volcano**

" _Arre, bhen ka...!"_

Amit Chowdhury, 34, heard a loud swear and craned his head looking for the source of the commotion. A middle aged man in a dirty white shirt and a loose pair of grey pants stood on the sidewalk, looking in dismay at the plastic cover at his feet. A dozen eggs had been inside and he bent down to salvage whatever he could of the mess. His wife was going to kill him.

A few hundred feet away from his little shop on the sidewalk, a large convoy of around forty cars lined the opposite side of the road. Around a dozen members of the Special Protection Group, who were among the most dangerous men in the country, stood next to the cars with their heads on a constant swivel. A few of the soldiers were looking at the man collecting his eggs with interest and were no doubt evaluating the seemingly innocuous scene. They were far too well trained to be swayed by parlour trick distractions. The sole job of the SPG was to protect the Prime Minister, who'd come to inaugurate an exhibit at the National Museum. He was currently inside the building with a few dozen more SPG men surrounding him.

Four armoured, bullet and bomb proof BMW 7 series cars stood in the middle of the long motorcade, with no discernible difference between them, to help obfuscate the Prime Minister's exact location when he travelled; even their number plates were the same. Six heavily armoured black BMW X series SUVs sandwiched them, three each at the front and the back. These were for the SPG troop movement and had heavy weapons on board. On the rear of this lineup was a black communications SUV, bristling with long, waving antennas and advanced equipment, jamming all radio signals in the vicinity and monitoring relevant national developments on a specially allocated frequency. The rest of the entourage was a combination of local law enforcement vehicles and luxury VIP vehicles for the ministers and the staff accompanying the Prime Minister.

Amit poured out another cup of tea for a customer and pocketed the change. He'd bought the shop and had been working here for the past few months as a coffee and tea maker. Seeing the flame of the small oil stove go down, he pumped the cylinder underneath with the small piston that was attached to it, feeding more fuel to the fire. The flame roared back up and the water boiled.

He was pouring out a cup of coffee when he felt the muted buzzing of his phone in his shirt's pocket. It was 10:55 a.m. The mission was a go.

 _Finally._

He dropped the coffee glass and pulled out a sleek, compact semi-automatic rifle from underneath the wooden table. He saw from the corner of his eyes three of his customers do the same from inside their roomy shirts. In a smooth motion, the four lined up their sights and pulled their triggers.

* * *

Aakarsh Jain, 27, was squeezing the trigger of his FN2000 Bullpup with the shop owner's head in his crosshairs, even as his target's first bullet leapt into the air. Aakarsh had been watching the man for the last few minutes and something about him had seemed off to the SPG commando. He'd quietly alerted his friends who lined the convoy and they'd all kept an eye out for trouble. When he saw the man suddenly drop a glass and reach down, he knew that the trouble had found them.

Amit managed to squeeze off just four high rounds from behind his counter before a bullet entered and exited his brain. He was dead before his nervous system could register the shot. His friends fared a little better and pulled off thirty rounds between them before they were shot to a pulp by seven different commandos, all expert marksmen and aiming for the head. In the investigation that followed, their faces would never be identified.

The SPG force guarding the cars alerted their counterparts inside the building and the Prime Minister was unceremoniously whisked outside, hidden from sight between the bodies of four burly commandos. They bundled him inside one of the four black BMW sedans. Bullets peppered the armoured BMWs and one of them nicked Aakarsh's bulletproof elbow guard.

Aakarsh raised his Bullpup and fired at the figures in the sky. Humanoid creatures with metallic, ten foot wide wings and bulky war suits were swiftly descending on the scene and he noted with dread that they sported heavy weaponry. He knew that his commandos wouldn't fare well on foot; they had a better chance as moving targets. He gave the order to his men, and they quickly got into the heavily armoured BMWs and the ten cars peeled off from the main convoy, tires squealing on the asphalt for a grip. The lead BMW X5, with Aakarsh at its helm, was mostly solid mass, with armour heavier than the other vehicles in the convoy. It had a bull bar running over its front and was built for ramming aside blockades and adequately weaponized to clear out enemy embankments. Powered by a monstrous V16 engine, it roared through the closed off roads at a hundred forty kilometres an hour with the convoy in tow.

Whenever the Prime Minister travelled, two separate routes were always kept clear that headed to the nearest fortified location, and local police manned the traffic stops and their vehicles blocked the smaller crossings. He swung a hard right, the wheels biting into the hard ground, protesting against the inertia. Around five hundred meters down the road at a wide junction, a large truck broke through the police barrier, smashing aside a police jeep and coming to a rest in the middle of the road, blocking their way. He warned the convoy behind him through their emergency communication channel. He gave a quick order to his only passenger, Jasween Singh, a six and a half foot tall commando currently on loan to the SPG from the high altitude Himalayan forces.

Jasween clambered into the backseat with an ease that was surprising for someone his height. He manned the missile controls and launched a low explosive warhead at the truck in front of them, mindful of the civilians in the area. Two thin trails of fire snaked out from the top of the SUV and raced towards the truck. The large vehicle didn't stand a chance. It burst into pieces and just seconds later, Amit's SUV ploughed through it, ripping it apart like a paper towel.

The creatures in the flight suits had given the convoy a reprieve, following at a safe distance, mindful of the heavy anti-aircraft machine guns that fired from atop five of the SUVs and the missile launcher on the lead. But when they saw that their truck had failed, they closed the distance, braving the hail of machine gun bullets and fired at the convoy. The creatures had switched to incendiary ammo and their bullets tore up the road around the convoy, throwing up dirt and rock ten feet into the air, rocking the armoured vehicles as they took direct hits to the chassis. The bullet-proof tires of all the cars were completely shredded by the onslaught and the convoy had to slow down, running on the hard rubber that clung to the rims of the wheels.

The SPG managed to take out five of their flying pursuers with the machine guns, but more than twenty of the buggers still remained. The creatures were proving to be formidable adversaries. One of them unleashed what looked like a cannon blast and one of the four main sedans took the blast squarely on its side, flipping on its back and slamming into the median. Thankfully, it had been one of the decoys and its lone driver would survive with minor injuries. The SUV at the rear was also lost as it took a cannon blast to its tail end, collapsing its axle. The SPG men quickly filed out of the car and emptied their guns at the enemy above the receding convoy.

The eight remaining cars neared their goal, where platoons of soldiers stood guard with machine gun turrets and anti-aircraft flak guns. Aakarsh saw that they were less than a kilometre away.

 _The Prime Minister has to survive._

As the cars ate up the distance, he suddenly saw something that made him ease the accelerator pedal up from the floor. A few hundred metres away, a large armoured figure hopped over the median and into the middle of the road. The man was enormous at around seven feet high, with mottled white skin and a blank, dead expression on his wide face. Aakarsh felt his gut sinking.

 _Solomon Grundy._

Due to the extreme threat level against the Indian Prime Minister, the head of a country that was home to more than one-seventh of the world's entire population, the SPG forces guarding him had been thoroughly briefed on the most dangerous metahumans on the planet. Luckily, India had never been much of a meta-human hotbed before but apparently, things had changed. He swore and urged Jasween to unleash his entire arsenal of missiles on the undead man and he slowed his speeding SUV, ordering the convoy behind him to come to a halt. Ramming Grundy would be like running into a solid rock wall, except worse.

The three Sedans came to a stop on the wide four lane road and the five SUVs slowed to form a rough perimeter around them to box in the Prime Minister. Two machine guns and the missile launcher unloaded their ammo in an unrelenting flood aimed at the uncaring monster who stood a few hundred metres in front of them. The guns on the other SUVs picked out the flying creatures that had closed their distance and were now trying to slip into the hemisphere of safety that the machine guns had carved out.

Aakarsh was a realist. He would hope for the best and fight till his last breath, but he estimated that it would take Grundy only a minute to tear through the convoy. He prepared for his final battle.

He got out of the car and instructed his men to stop firing at the monster and train their weapons on the flying creatures. He didn't want to be interrupted. He calmly walked up to the monster and smiled.

"Hi Grundy!" he shouted. "Long time no see, my friend! How have you been?!"

For his part, Grundy looked appropriately confused.

"Grundy smash black cars!" he eloquently responded.

Aakarsh smiled widely, showing his teeth, "Grundy smash blue car, yes. Grundy smash big, shiny blue car! Look, big blue car! Grundy smash!"

Grundy turned around to where the little man was pointing and saw a shiny, blue car with its door rising in the air like a wing.

"Grundy smash!" he growled and leapt towards the deserted blue Lamborghini Aventador, its owner cowering not ten feet away behind the shutters of a small shop, along with at least forty terrified people. Grundy smashed the sports car to smithereens, at one point even pausing to chew and spit out the engine of the car. He shook his head as if to clear it and came back slowly, trundling on his big, hairy feet to stand in front of Aakarsh.

"Little man lie to me," he growled. "Grundy smash black cars!"

 _Oh shit. Well, it was a good try._

He cocked his fist, throwing a punch at Grundy. If he was going to die, he might as well die doing something that looked heroic.

Grundy's head snapped back with a resounding _Crack!_ and Aakarsh felt the ringing in his ears. _Did I just get superpowers?_

He saw a tall man in red and blue standing close to him. _Oh._

'Are you okay?' he could make out Superman mouthing the words to him and Aakarsh nodded with a relieved smile. The Son of Krypton smiled kindly at him, and pointed at the convoy and then at their fortified destination down the road. Aakarsh simply nodded and raced back to the convoy which was still under heavy fire from the flying creatures. He got into the driver's seat and floored the accelerator, hearing the screeching as the metal rims struggled to find purchase on the ground. The convoy headed towards the two titans fighting in the middle of the road when the commandos heard the roar of a powerful engine over the cacophony of battle. Just in front of them, a green sports bike leapt from the maw of a glowing portal and hit the road, racing toward the convoy. A man in a green hood sat on it and he gestured for the convoy to speed up.

* * *

Oliver Queen put his bike on auto and straightened up. _Time for some target practice._ He loosed off a few arrows at the A'thunai, the flying creatures that seem focused only on the convoy. _What the hell are these things doing on Earth?_

He raced past the convoy as it headed in the opposite direction and began unleashing his full arsenal at the enemy. He downed five of them with a single high explosive arrow. He activated his Nth metal belt, a gift from Clark, and leapt into the air, using his speeding bike as a springboard. He dove into the first creature and speared it through its head with an arrow. He enjoyed the freedom that flight gave him as he culled the creatures one by one, picking them off with a combination of throwing knives, arrows, and close quarters combat. He flexed his ass to rise into the air and pulled down a surprised alien, throwing it to the ground and shooting it point blank with an arrow. _I have to admit, flying using my butt does make sense._

Sensing their dwindling numbers, the remaining beasts turned and darted towards him. The bullets simply bounced off the force field surrounding him. And he smiled.

 _I've been dying to test out this new gear._

* * *

Clark dodged and weaved as Grundy tried to land a punch on him. Clark couldn't afford to hit Grundy or be hit when people were nearby. The amount of power it would take to knock out Grundy would create a shock wave that would pulp the internal organs of any human within a hundred metre radius. He heard the convoy nearing them, and timing it just right, when Grundy's attention momentarily flickered to the black cars, he tackled the brute around the hips and caught him off guard. Not giving his opponent a chance to strike him, he threw Grundy like a large baseball, high into the air. Grundy quickly rose to a height of seven kilometres, quite confused about what had just happened.

Clark flew in at Mach 40 and caught Grundy with a powerful punch to his torso. The resulting shock wave rattled windows throughout the large city. He caught the out-for-the-count undead man and carried him out of Earth's atmosphere. He sped through interplanetary space towards the Sun; the journey took him nine minutes. He floated a few thousand kilometres away from the sun's corona.

He looked at the body in his arms. The League's scientists and Star Labs had conducted extensive studies of Grundy over the past several months upon his request and had come to the conclusion that Grundy was not a living being. What he was now was the powerful, dead body of a man which was fundamentally reprogrammed from time to time and given just enough life force to do the bidding of various masters. Clark had approached Amnesty International and their chairperson had agreed that it was more humane to let a dead man rest than to have him resurrected in such a horrifying way.

He spoke to the figure in his arms. "I'm sorry that all this had to happen to you, my friend. I wish you'd had a more tranquil life after death, that you hadn't been abused as you were. You're finally going to sleep, Solomon Grundy."

"Rest in peace, dear friend," he gently said, and flew Grundy into the sun's corona. Grundy's body was instantly converted to its elemental atoms, torn apart by the intense heat. Solomon Grundy was no more.

Clark basked in the warm glow of the Sun, his bio electric field soaking in the radiation and charging up the cells in his body.

He sped back to Earth and as he descended into the cool stratosphere, he noticed the heat from the Sun rising off him in waves. Clark dove deep into the Indian Ocean to cool his body and massive amounts of steam bubbled to the surface. He then flew towards New Delhi, coming in for a gentle landing at the site of the battle. Oliver had dealt with the A'thunai and had flown onwards to check if the Indian forces needed any assistance.

Around Clark was pure wreckage, deep bullet holes pockmarked the roads and the bodies of the aliens littered the road. They were well known intergalactic mercenaries. When he first arrived at the scene and discovered that the A'thunai were involved in the attack, his thoughts immediately went to Lex Luthor, who'd used them a few times before. He was hiding out somewhere in East Asia and was under a rogue government's complete protection.

'Any attempt to capture Lex Luthor is an act of war against our sovereignty,' the statement from the government had read. And the League had uneasily bided their time, waiting for him to come out of hiding. He made a note in his head to eliminate Lex Luthor as a threat by the end of the month, he had nineteen days left. Clark had been too lax in dealing with Luthor. Lex had killed far too many people, 4,387 by League estimate, with an additional 14 today.

 _I'm coming for you, Luthor._

Around him, the League's cleaning crew was hard at work cleaning up the bodies and the weaponry of the winged mercenaries. He smiled at the staff, they'd worked with the League for a good many years and he'd personally visited all their homes and families; they were good friends. Dressed in black paramilitary fatigues and carrying assault rifles on their backs for protection, they were standing beside the bodies of the dead aliens and used League issued levitators to move and bag them for transport. One of the League's five Phantom medium-cargo jets stood nearby, just barely fitting its wingspan on the wide road. He spotted Oliver's bike leaned against the median where it had parked itself and he mounted it and called out a cheerful goodbye to the staff, who were watching him with amused grins on their faces. Superman had always loved fast bikes. He aimed the bike down the wide avenue toward the fortifications and gunned the engine. _It handles like a dream._

* * *

Rahul, 17, half-turned to his friend Sania, who was of the same age. They were coming out of hiding from beneath a large truck parked on the side of the road and heard the roar of a loud engine to their right.

"Tell me that isn't Superman on Green Arrow's bike," he said.

Sania mutely shook her head, her head whipping to the side as the Superhero roared past them at a blistering two hundred kilometres an hour, his red cape fluttering behind him as he hugged the sports bike. The awestruck crowd burst out laughing when the bike suddenly lifted into the air, gracefully jumping over an intersection. Superman was _flying_ the bike.

She finally turned to Rahul. "That was possibly the greatest thing I've ever witnessed in my life!"

* * *

 **The Watch Tower, a few hundred kilometres above Earth**

 **Half an hour later**

"I can't believe he would just agree let us do that! I expected more friction from the Eastern governments. This is amazing!" Dinah gushed as she cuddled into her husband's side.

Clark and Oliver had just ported back, along with the Arrow bike. 'It's just a sports bike, Clark! There _is_ no Arrow bike!'

The heroes were sitting in the lounge on comfortable sofas, sipping iced lattes.

"I'm not too surprised, Dinah. When I met the G20 countries a few months back, the Indian Prime Minister was among the few who expressed their open interest in the Global Defense Force."

"How much do you think he'll convince his government to cough up?" Oliver asked.

"After what happened today? Easily upwards of three hundred billion dollars over five years."

Oliver whistled, "Now that is quite something."

Clark nodded, it sure was.

Oliver paused for a second, weighing something in his head. "You and Kara basically have unlimited resources, Clark, you can mine from anywhere in outer space. And between me, Bruce, Arthur, and Diana, we have enough currency to fund our complete operation exceedingly well. I'm curious to know why you insist on having government funding."

"If you offer something freely to someone, they'll be thankful initially, but they'll forget its worth in the decades that follow. However, if you make them pay for something? They're going to make sure that they'll get their money's worth and remain vigilant."

"Huh," Oliver mused. "I suppose you're right."

"Hey, since when do you not get into a punching match with Grundy?" Dinah suddenly asked. "I watched the tape of your fight, and your moves were so well coordinated! You've learned yourself a new martial art, Clark! You've been holding out on us!" she accused.

"Oh," Clark shifted in his seat and decided to go with the blunt truth. "Well, Diana and I were stuck in this dimension for a thousand years and we had to fight off an unstoppable army for all that time. So I sort of developed a martial arts form best suited to my physiology I guess, few of Earth's art forms worked for me when I have powers, you know that."

"Wait, what? Hold on, rewind," Oliver said, holding up his hands in a 'stop right there' gesture.

"Yeah, it's impossible for me to use Krav Maga or Muay Thai. It's too impractical for me, I'm afraid."

Oliver stared at him, unimpressed.

"Don't play dumb with me, Kent."

Clark slumped back on the sofa, "Fine, I guess it's about time we tell you anyway. But let's wait for the team to get here. I'd prefer telling you all at the same time during the meeting. Plus, Diana will be there to pick up on anything I miss out. Thousand years is a lot even for a Kryptonian brain, apparently."

He continued, "Now, come, Ollie, pass me your Arrow tablet, and that Arrow stylus over there and I'll show you my ideas for your new Arrow bike."

"Hey!" Oliver's loud protest rang through the lounge before Dinah burst out laughing at the indignant look on his face.


	7. Chapter G

A.N: Before we begin the chapter, here is a timeline of events in this universe. I'll have a version of it on my profile that I'll keep updated as I add more stories and events.

* * *

 **May 2005** \- March of 2006:- Clark Kent joins the Daily Planet and befriends Lois Lane. She learns of his identity in July 2005. Clark turns 20 years old in March 2005.

 **February 2006** \- Zod escapes the Phantom Zone, the only Kryptonian to have survived and escaped the Zone. He is killed by Clark after Zod burns a crowd of people with his heat vision.

 **March 2006** \- Clark shifts to Star City temporarily. The events in this period will be chronicled in my ongoing story 'A Tale of Crimson.' A story with dark themes where Clark deals with his personal demons in the aftermath of the thousands of deaths during the Zod incident. He meets the various Arrowverse heroes and has meaningful relationships with them, both platonic and romantic ones. He takes to wearing a Blue Kryptonite ring and lives as a human during his period of stay in Star City. (Diana and Clark meet for the first time during this period.)

 **2008** \- Lois Lane and J'onn J'onzz meet when the latter impersonates Clark at the Planet to cover for him. They begin a romance and get married in 2011. Clark and Zatanna also meet for the first time, introduced to each other by Lois.

 **2009 - 2012** :- Zatanna and Clark are in a serious, live-in relationship during this period. They, through mutual agreement, break up amicably in 2012 and remain good friends.

 **September 2013** \- Clark visits Themyscira for the first time.

 **April 2017** \- Kara arrives on Earth and is rescued by Clark. Major earthquake hits Japan, and Okinawa is devastated. Clark is 32 years as of March 2017.

 **October 2017** \- Diana gets attacked by a rogue government while in Iraq. Clark and Diana confess their love for each other and begin a relationship. The Yellowstone Caldera is bombed and Clark, Kara, and Diana save the United States from annihilation. Clark and Kara reveal the long history of the Kryptonians to the League. Clark begins working toward and succeeds in his goal of getting the League to waive the non-interference policy on Earth. He announces cancer cure development and founds Kandor Inc.

 **May 2018** \- Kandor Island is finally completed in the Atlantic Ocean. Bruce Wayne visits the island and meets Clark, who gifts him a highly advanced Kryptonian Batsuit and a new Batjet.

 **June 2018** \- The Indian Prime Minister comes under an attack orchestrated by Lex Luthor and is rescued by the Green Arrow and Superman. Solomon Grundy is euthanised. India becomes the first country to pledge resources to the Global Defense Force which is spearheaded by the Justice League.

 **June 11, 2018** \- Where we are currently. Battle in India earlier in the day. League meeting to start at 1800 hrs Greenwich Standard Time (GST).

 **June 30, 2018** \- Self-imposed deadline for Clark to eliminate the threat of Lex Luthor.

* * *

 **Conference Room of The Watch Tower**

 **June 11, 2018 - 1805 hrs GST**

A short while back, Victor and Clark had ported down to Ukraine when an emergency call had come in from their government. Vital Ukrainian institutions were under a concerted cyber attack and the country was close to the verge of major disaster and a widespread loss of lives. Superman and Cyborg had, with the permission of the Ukrainian head of state, introduced into the national servers an advanced virus that the two of them had developed a few months ago. The virus targeted and tracked every iteration of the virus and eliminated all traces of it from computers nationwide. As they monitored the progress of the virus from a data centre in Kiev, a location had popped up on Clark's and Victor's interfaces, the name original source of the cyber attack. Their virus had the ability to carefully trace the incoming pathways for the cyber attack and find the instigating computer network. The virus they'd coded could counter attack and completely take down the hardware of the source, but they had to approve the action first. They looked at each other for a second, weighing the decision, and they grinned at each other. Victor entered a few commands and approved the action. They didn't have anything personal against the country that had tried to take down Ukraine's servers and cause a catastrophe that would lead to the deaths of thousands of civilians, but... it was a pretty "dick" move as Wally would put it, and the two felt that a little punishment was due the perpetrators. Their virus would leave the computers of the offenders useless and more importantly, harmless.

It hadn't taken them a long time, Earth computers were very primitive and the Fortress mainframe AI along with Ukrainian techies could easily diagnose and resolve the rest of the issues that had arisen from the attack. The two bid their farewells to a thankful President, and ported back to the station a few minutes late for the meeting. They walked into the conference room and found everyone doubled over in laughter, even Bruce was allowing himself a wide grin. On a presentation screen on one side of the large room, an amateur-shot YouTube video was playing. An Indian teenager was ranting excitedly in the background of the shaky visuals as Superman raced a sports bike on screen, lifting the bike bodily into the air over an intersection. As the teen's hilarious comments in heavily accented English and occasional bursts of fluent Hindi grew more intense, Flash fell off his chair, clutching his stomach and rolling on the tiled floor laughing.

They all looked up to see Clark and Victor enter the room as the doors slid closed with a hiss.

"Clark!" Wally gasped out and stood up, trying to control his laughter, "I've always wanted to ask, why do you like sports bikes so much when you can fly so much faster?"

Clark instantly pointed at Dinah with a grin, "It's all this one's fault," he accused.

The others looked at the two of them, confused, while Ollie and Helena hid their grins. They knew the story.

Dinah spoke up, "God, it feels like forever ago! This happened well before most of The League had met each other. Clark had just shifted to Star City for a couple of years back in, when was it, Clark? 2006?"

Clark nodded.

"This was the year after Ollie had supposedly died in the shipwreck, and Clark and I ran into each other at some gala and became good friends. A long story short, I had to rescue Clark in a hurry when he was without his powers, and I might have terrified him when I tore through the city at night at two hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. He asked me to lend his bike to him from time to time after that, and the rest," she rolled her eyes at the screen, "is history."

"Huh, I never knew you lived in Star City, Clark," Hal mused,

"It was an interesting," he caught Helena Bertinelli's eyes, "two years. I learned a lot."

"So did I," Helena said so that only he could hear, with a soft smile directed at him.

"Before I forget," Dinah continued, "Clark and Diana have a story for us. They've been holding out on us. Again." She gave a pointed stare to the two who were sitting next to each other and they shifted in their seats.

Clark turned to Diana, "Care to do the honours?" he asked.

She nodded, "Sure, Kal. I guess we better start from the very beginning. You see, when two people make love... a baby is born... No, Wally, I'm just jesting," she chuckled looking at the speedster's look of eagerness which quickly turned into disappointment. "It all started just five days ago."

* * *

 **Den Haag, The Netherlands**

 **June 6, 2018**

"Kal! Stop it!" Diana giggled as Clark tickled her sides. "Hera help you if I drop this ice-cream cone, Kal. It's delicious and I have no desire to see it wasted."

"Fine, alright. You're no fun, princess," he teased.

They were walking under the midday Sun on one of the city's wide beaches. The waves lapped at their bare feet and they were still clad in their uniforms, they'd had some work at the International Court of Justice nearby and had decided to stop for some refreshments before heading back home. The beaches were moderately crowded, as was expected on a summer day in Northern Europe. The ice cream vendor had frozen at the sight of the two, especially Diana, and had to be shaken slightly by an amused Superman to get him to function.

They saw and heard the people staring at them and talking about them, but what Clark and Diana both appreciated about the European people was their civility. None of the awestruck people around them approached or disturbed them, sensing that the two superheroes were here for a rare break and letting them have their moment of peace. The two weren't really concerned about being spotted together as a couple either. While they wouldn't announce to the world their relationship, they certainly wouldn't hide it. It was their business and they weren't going to let anyone dictate the terms of their lives.

So they walked, Clark enjoying the gentle Sun of the Northern latitudes and Diana feeling the white sands crumble gently beneath her toes.

They suddenly stopped and tensed.

"Do you hear that?" Diana asked.

"Yeah."

They moved away and waited for the interdimensional portal to completely open in front of them. They directed the people around them to move back. Diana had one hand on her sword and Clark slightly crouched, grounding himself against a possible attack. But the man that emerged through the rip in space-time was clearly in no shape to fight. He stumbled and fell onto the beach and the portal closed behind him.

He looked at Diana.

"Are you Diana, the daughter of Zeus?" he asked.

"I am she, and who might you be, stranger?" Diana asked.

"I am Thor Odinson, heir to the throne of Asgard."

The man tried to say something further but he fainted from the extensive wounds on his body.

"Kal-Ex, port us to the Med Bay directly, please," Clark spoke into his communicator.

"Can we treat him? His physiology will be different from ours," Diana said as they rematerialized in the Fortress' Medical Bay. A humanoid iteration of Kal-Ex was waiting for them and it lifted Thor's body carefully using a levitator and placed him on an operating table. It ran a quick body scan and the results appeared on a tablet in Clark's hand.

"The Norse gods aren't that different from your Gods and the Fortress was able to heal Aphrodite well enough," Clark absently replied, his mind on the damage report of the fallen god's body.

"Aphrodite?" Diana asked with a steely voice, already suspecting the story. "You met Aphrodite?"

"Yeah, she was hurt by..."

"Ares?" Diana dryly asked, "And after you healed her, she must have insisted that she _thank_ you profusely? Gods, Kal! How could you fall for that old trick?"

"Oh, I didn't fall for it, I knew exactly what she was doing," he replied and instantly regretted it.

Diana punched him on the shoulder, mumbling to herself, "Damn Kryptonian can't keep it in his pants."

* * *

 **Med Bay, Fortress of Solitude**

 **Three and a half hours later**

Clark and Diana stood next to the table where Thor was just beginning to sit up, his body fully healed.

"Thank you, my friends. You are exceedingly kind. I believe I find myself at a disadvantage," Thor held his hand out to Clark.

Clark smiled and shook his hand, "I am Kal-El, the last son of Krypton."

Thor's eyes widened, looking at him curiously, "A Kryptonian? Most interesting."

He continued, "I apologize for crashing into your dimension in this manner. I came to seek assistance from the daughter of Zeus."

"What has happened?" Diana asked.

"Our kingdom is under attack from evil forces. Normally, none are a match for the might of Asgard, but these demons that now fight us are unlike anything I've witnessed in my many millennia alive. They are bent on retrieving the life force that resides in the blood of Odin. The demons believe that obtaining Odin's life force will allow them to control the minds of all Asgardians to form an army, and then use that super powered army to take over all worlds."

"Are the demons right in believing that?" Clark asked.

"The threat is real, yes."

Clark and Diana turned to each other, having an unspoken conversation with their eyes.

"We shall accompany you, Odinson. Let it not be said that Midgard did not heed the call of Asgard," Diana told Thor. "You will rest now and we shall leave in six Earth hours. This will give the two of us time to wrap things up, for we don't know how long we shall be gone."

"Oh, please do not worry. After the war, the two of you shall be transported back to Earth to the same time you originally left it," Thor said.

"I pray it won't happen, but what if the war claims our lives?" Diana asked.

"You are a true warrior indeed," Thor stated with a smile at Diana's question. "But do not concern yourselves with death in the Asgardian dimension. We all cycle through life and death and anyone who falls is brought back to life in one cycle."

"Well, that's convenient," Clark joked.

"And mind numbingly painful," Thor added helpfully.

"Well, it is decided then, we leave in six hours. I will show you to quarters where you can rest, Thor Odinson. But first, let's pick out weapons for this war. I don't wish to be poorly prepared," Clark said and led the two to the Fortress Armoury on Level 30.

"What manner of beings plague you?" Diana asked as the trio entered the giant hall, packed from ceiling to floor and wall to wall with every type of weapon imaginable. Kal had gone through a 'weapon loving' phase when he'd first discovered the Fortress' advanced tools for engineering and had spent quite a bit of time devising weapons for many eventualities. He rarely used them in battle, and even that only when he faced a foe of Steppenwolf's paygrade or higher. Thor let out a low whistle.

"Your armoury is well stocked, Kryptonian. As for your question, Daughter of Zeus, these beings are magical and very powerful. They match my strength, if not outclass me, and to make things worse, they have an endless army of mindless minions that feel no pain, and don't die easily. They've had centuries to produce these underlings in truly incomprehensible numbers and they now fall upon the borders of Asgard in unrelenting waves."

Clark walked up to one of the rows of pure white pedestals in the middle of the hall that displayed a variety of weapons. He picked up a sword that was in its sheath and slowly withdrew it. It glowed a faint red and the colour intensified as he brought it closer to Thor and Diana.

"It detects magic based weapons?" Diana guessed, gesturing to her own weaponry and Thor's hammer that hung on his belt.

Clark nodded, "When it interacts with any magical weapon it briefly eliminates the magic imbued in it, reverting it back into an ordinary weapon that can easily be defeated or which I can crush by hand since its magical properties would have left it."

He handed the sword to Diana to examine and picked up a small headset from an adjacent platform. It was a very thin band of a Titanium alloy that could be placed on one's head. One of the most fundamental laws of electromagnetism is that a moving charge creates an electromagnetic wave. By its corollary, an electromagnetic wave also creates a moving charge. And these two simple rules formed the basis for the advanced field of telepathy. A telepath had highly developed receptors in their body that allowed them to pick up on the faint signals emitted by a brain as its neurons fire; this allowed them to "read" thoughts. And they influenced the thoughts of others by sending out carefully constructed electromagnetic waves that induced certain thoughts in their target's brain. Clark had studied this phenomenon extensively over a few weeks with J'onn's assistance and participation. The two had come up with the headset that Clark was now holding up, a neural influencer. It was a more advanced and weaponized version of the technology that Clark had built into the Leaguers' communicators that allowed them to communicate directly to their teammates in the midst of a battle.

This particular headset could influence the thoughts of the enemies that surrounded its wearer. For a potent multi tasking brain such as that of a Kryptonian, the band could go as far as controlling individual opponents and their actions, potentially turning them against their fellow soldiers.

Diana was examining a longsword that Clark had forged by hand on the Sun's surface with a rare Kryptonian metal. She weighed it in her hand and commented that it was well balanced. And without warning, she flicked the flat of the blade on Clark's rear.

Clark let out a surprised and undignified yelp, "What was that for?!"

"Aphrodite," Diana whispered.

"Oh my God," Clark groaned, still holding his tender butt.

"Yes, Kal-El?" Thor asked, looking at Clark questioningly.

"Oh... no no, it was just an expression, never mind," he said glumly and gave Diana the stink eye.

She just grinned at him cheekily. _If he thinks I'm letting him get away scott free, he's gravely mistaken._

* * *

A.N: I revisited all my previous chapters and I've made corrections to the grammar and writing. Parts of it were quite atrocious since I was in a hurry.


	8. Chapter H

**Somewhere in Asgard**

 **Thousand Years Later**

Diana stepped through the shimmering curtain of muted white light that served as a door. She looked around and spotted Kal standing near the edge looking down at the city that lay sprawled beneath them. They hadn't gotten a lot of time to themselves in the seven hours since the war had ended. Asgardians were passionate beings, both in times of war and peace, and had dragged her and Kal headfirst into their reckless partying. A few levels down, the best beers from the nine realms was on tap and not a single Asgardian was sober. The last she saw of him, Thor had been drunkenly flirting with himself in a mirror, with the usually composed Sif passed out by his side on a three-legged stool that threatened to tip over at any moment.

Diana quietly walked up to Kal. He didn't move, but she knew that he'd heard her. He always did.

"Couldn't bear the revelry?"

"No," Clark replied in a subdued voice.

They were standing on the top deck of one of Asgard's high-rises, three-hundred floors above the streets. The buildings in Asgard, like everything else, were almost shockingly opulent. From her experience, advanced civilizations after a few hundred millennia usually opted for a clean, efficient look to their infrastructure, having grown tired of complicated designs. But the Asgardians had stayed true to their roots and all their creations were aesthetic, to say the least.

"What are you thinking about, Kal?"

"You," he replied, and lifted his arm. She gladly accepted his invitation and relaxed into his side, a smile gracing her features as he placed a soft kiss to her temple.

Clark sighed deeply, and Diana felt his arm tighten imperceptibly around her, drawing her closer.

"Can I tell you something, Di?"

"Anything, Kal."

"All those deaths in the last thousand years, all the beings we had to kill. I just realized that I feel no remorse for their deaths. I don't have any guilt in me," he said.

Diana was confused.

"Isn't that a good thing, Kal? Those beings were controlled by dark forces and we released them from a life of cruelty and torture. You know that."

"I do. I understand it. But Superman doesn't get that excuse. He can never kill, Diana. We go back tomorrow to the world where we are the protectors. Where we swore to represent the best of humanity no matter what. But right now, at this moment after a thousand years of instinctive killing, I can't tell myself for certain that I won't just snap Lex Luthor's neck the second we get back. That I won't hunt down and castrate every rapist on the planet. That I won't imprison every last dictator by force and install a democratic government in their stead. Every fleeting authoritarian impulse I had during our lives on Earth, Diana, is returning with full force."

Diana hummed her agreement into his chest. She'd been having similar thoughts. But growing up as the heir of a monarchy with strict laws, Diana would be more susceptible to these impulses than Kal. She'd been hoping that Kal would be the guiding light that would temper her actions when they returned to Earth, but she realized that Kal needed help too.

"I too have been thinking along the same lines, Kal. You know what we need to do, right? We can't go back tomorrow, we need more time."

Kal nodded, and she suddenly heard him chuckle.

"Oh. My God." he perfectly imitated a valley girl. "We. Are going on a vacay! That's so crazay!"

She chuckled and then pushed him away. She saw the questioning look in his eyes and growled.

"Alright, _buster_ , I've been patient long enough."

She took two steps and jumped, landing on his hips and locking her legs around his waist. She pulled up his stunned face.

"Tonight, my love, your body is mine."

Kal's eyes turned red and he caught her lips in a torrid kiss. He briefly turned his head and fried the circuitry that powered the door to the roof. It wouldn't do for anyone to witness what he was about to do to Diana. Or more accurately, what she was about to do to him. His last coherent thought was _Rao!_ as Diana ripped apart his expensive suit with a primal roar.

* * *

 **Himinbjörg, Asgard - Heimdall's Residence**

 **Two Years Later**

"We are going to miss you two around here," Sif said as she hugged Diana.

"We'll miss Asgard too, remember that you and Thor are always welcome on Earth," Diana replied warmly.

Clark gave Thor a manly back-slap but Thor would have none of it and pulled him into a tight hug. A thousand years of war had forged an everlasting friendship between the two men.

Clark and Diana made their way to the portal gate, where Heimdall stood waiting. Heimdall was the gatekeeper and guardian of the Bifrost, the bridge that connected Asgard and Midgard dimensions.

Heimdall spoke, "I'm sending you two back to the same instant that you left your planet. Since you're travelling to the future on Earth..."

Clark interrupted, "Future?"

"Yes, equating Earth's timeline with that of Asgard's, the former is currently in the Triassic Era," Heimdall explained.

"Huh. That makes no sense whatsoever, but then neither does magic," Clark mused.

Diana ribbed him, "Kal, I thought you were over your distaste for magic."

Clark's eyes widened as he tried to placate the Amazon. Thor, Sif, and Heimdall chuckled as their two friends disappeared into the Bifrost, with Clark in the midst of professing his love for magic.

* * *

 **Watchtower**

 **June 11, 2018 - 1930 hrs GMT**

"And so, here we are, a thousand long years later," Diana concluded the long story, with a gentle smile at her friends and fellow warriors. "We really missed you all. It's good to be back on Earth."

"And in the right time period too," Clark quipped. "Really would've sucked if we'd gotten stuck with the dinosaurs. They're no fun."

"Damn," Oliver muttered. "One thousand years and your jokes still suck."

The archer ducked as Clark tossed a pen at him.

"I hate to break this up," Victor interrupted. "But I'm getting reports of a rally quickly heading south in Charlottesville. White supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and the KKK are marching again. From what I can tell from social media and CCTV feeds, they've brought along fifty times the firepower the local PD is carrying. Law enforcement doesn't stand a chance if things go sour."

Clark stood up, "Diana and I will handle this."

Victor nodded and froze for a second as his semi-virtual brain trawled the web. "The world is watching, Clark. Every major news network is flying crews out to the location. The Planet is already there."

"Lois?" Clark asked.

"Lois," Victor confirmed.

* * *

 **Charlottesville, Virginia**

 **June 11, 2018 - 1936 hrs GMT - 1536 hrs Local Time (EDT)**

"Lois, remind me once again why we're in the middle of this mess?" Jimmy Olsen asked.

"Because, for some reason, Perry thought it would be a good idea to make you a field reporter. So you're here to help me with my piece. By taking pictures," Lois replied. "Which you don't seem to be doing."

"Gee, I dunno Lois. I have a bad feeling about all this," he tugged nervously on his ID tag. He hoisted his Nikon D5 outfitted with a ridiculously expensive 400mm Nikkor lens (it cost The Planet more than his annual salary) and zoomed in on a protester wearing Nazi insignia and carrying a semi-automatic rifle.

"These guys look pissed," he commented.

"Why wouldn't they be? These inbred morons are realizing that they're irrelevant now. In a few decades, skin colour will become a worthless measure, and they can't bear that thought," Lois replied absently, scanning the crowd of liberal counter-protesters for someone to interview.

"Stay here, Olsen, try to get a good shot."

Before Jimmy could say a word, Lois slipped into the crowd, angling towards the elderly vet she'd seen marching with the Antifa at the very back of the crowd. As she reached out to tap the old man on the shoulder, a series of events happened in the span of a few seconds. She heard the revving of a powerful car and the squealing of tires on dry asphalt. She whipped her head around to see a Dodge Challenger barreling down the road towards them. She was at the rear end of the crowd and there was only a young girl between her and the car. Lois shoved the girl out of the way, sending the girl sprawling onto the pavement. The momentum pushed Lois into the path of the car and it was too late for her to jump out of the way. _Shit. This is a sad way to die._ She stood her ground and made eye contact with the driver, her killer, a chubby twenty-something with a hateful snarl on his face. She looked at him defiantly, a few milliseconds that stretched to infinity. Her heart versus his hate. _Bring it on, you little Nazi shit._

And just like that, it was over. The ground shook, the asphalt cracked and the Mercedes was a total wreck. Superman rose from where he'd dropped to one knee in front of the car, dusting off metallic fragments from his suit. He picked up the driver by his collar from where he'd landed on his back after being thrown out through the windshield. He planted the man vertically on his feet.

"I can't hit you," Clark spoke in a clipped voice to the cowering terrorist. "And that's unfortunate because _trust_ me, that's all I want to do right now. Her, however..."

Clark stepped aside as Lois' haymaker found its mark, and her would-be killer dropped like a sack of potatoes, his nose permanently disfigured.

"Self-defense," Lois joked.

Clark smiled weakly. Unlike the other times he'd saved Lois, this time, it was by sheer luck. If he'd arrived a millisecond later, he would've lost his best friend.

Lois saw the emotions on his face.

"I'm alright, Clark," she quickly whispered under her breath so that the people swarming him wouldn't hear her. "You were there for me like you promised, and that's all that matters. Now go, there are others that need you more. Pizza tonight at my place, on me. Bring Diana along."

Clark blinked, watching her walk away to get live reactions from the crowd. Only Lois freakin' Lane would shrug off a near certain death as if it were a run-of-the-mill thing, which for her, it was. Diana once joked that Lois was an advanced species of cat with nine-hundred lives, snarky behaviour included.

He looked up to see his Amazon better half talking to the crowd of hateful protesters in the distance. News cameras would capture her efforts and deem them idealistic and futile, but she was actually weaving the magic of the lasso into her words. And when she spoke to her targets, she was forcing them to confront the delusions that they had so carefully built around themselves. By the end of the day, the magic would have burned away all their lies and deception, leaving only goodness of heart and guilt. At that point, she would send in her organization - Life After Hate - to enrol those people into a program to heal and contribute to helping prevent others from falling victim to the same hatred.

He flew over to the media crews a few hundred metres away. They began shouting questions at him and he gracefully held up his hand, asking for silence.

"The League has a policy of never interfering in the politics of any country. But I will say this. Slavery is bad, and it always will be. Any celebration of slavery or slavers should be viewed with caution. That is not conducive to the world we live in, nor the world that we wish to one day become. Love _always_ overcomes hate. Never forget that. If Earth can accept immigrants from other planets, it can certainly accept its own, skin colour be damned."

He gave the cameras a wide smile and flew over to join Diana and her crowd of erstwhile racists. He made it a point never to become angry or to swear on camera, and the fact that he'd deliberately used a swear word on national television would send in its undertones the message that he was pissed. _Good_.

"Superman!" shouted a man with a thick beard in a T-Shirt that said 'ALL LIVES MATTER.' "I'm sorry about what happened back there. We're just sorry little creatures who are afraid of what we cannot understand or comprehend, so we channel our fear into hatred and try to harm others."

Superman turned to Wonder Woman with an amused smile. She conceded, "I should probably tone down the magic. Wouldn't want them to introspect too much and become nihilistic."

Working in tandem, the two wrapped up their work in the small town and left for the Space Station. Clark dropped a Firearm Disabler on a nearby roof as they lifted off. The small, but powerful module would cripple every gun in a one-kilometre radius as soon as any trigger was pulled. He didn't want to interfere, but he couldn't allow the loss of lives either. The two heroes broke through the stratosphere and an invisible force field extended itself from Diana's armour and encased her body, allowing her to survive in outer space. Clark chose not to deploy his own suit's shields. Under the yellow sun, he could survive indefinitely in space as his body switched to a metabolism mode that let it feed on the pure solar energy that was stored in each cell of his body. He'd never tested his limits, but he guessed that as long as he was within a few thousand light-years of a yellow sun, his body would function normally.

Diana activated the telepathic link in their League communicators.

 _'What's next, Kal? I'm sorry I've been so busy after we returned from Asgard. I missed my mother and my sisters terribly and I needed to spend time with them. It scares me how used I've become to having you by my side. I could barely sleep without you holding me.'_

 _'I missed you too, Di. I might have cheated and looked in on you a few times, just to make sure you were alright.'_

Diana chuckled.

 _'I know. I sensed you nearby.'_

Kal glanced at her as they crested the Ionosphere.

 _'What do you think about journalism?'_

 _'Journalism? I respect it, and I think it's one of the most important professions out there with regards to global decision-making. Why do you ask?'_

 _'I'm thinking about starting a news organization. With the technology at the Fortress, we already know exactly what goes on and where. I hate that charlatans and goons misuse the media to promote their false stories. I think it'll help if we set up something that the people can trust. A place for the absolute truth and nothing else. No spin, no opinion. Just facts. What do you think?'_

 _'Sounds like a lot of work.'_

Clark smiled.

 _'I've already set up the systems. It's going to be completely automatic with the occasional input from us. Victor is wired into the systems so he can take care of any urgent issues. I just need your input before we launch. I really want you to be a part of this.'_

 _'I'm flattered that you waited for my opinion, Kal. It sounds like a wonderful idea. I'd be honoured to be a part of this endeavour.'_

 _'Great!'_ Clark did a flip in the air and Diana laughed at his silliness. ' _Kal and Diana in da house!'_

 _'Oh Kal, you're so cute.'_

 _'Cute? CUTE? Nobody calls Superman cute! Di! Get back here!'_

She stopped abruptly and dropped from his view. ' _Catch me if you can, cutie.'_

He bit back a smile as he rocketed after her. ' _Oh_ , _it is on, princess. You're toast.'_

* * *

A.N: I debated basing more of the story in Asgard, but it didn't seem as appealing to me as developing the story here on Earth and building the world further. This chapter was mainly filler. I'll let Clark delve into more of the world starting from the next chapter. It's high time we met the Injustice League, don't you think? The timeline of this story can be found in my author profile - it'll be updated every time I write a new chapter.


	9. Chapter I

**United Nations Secretariat**

 **June 16, 2018 - 0900 hrs Eastern Time - 1300 hrs GMT**

"Welcome to New York, Mr. Kang. We hope you have a pleasant visit."

With a polite smile, the short man with Asian features stepped through the secure turnstiles. He picked up his phone and laptop from the scanning tray and deposited them in his sleek leather briefcase.

Cha Seung Kang was a diplomat from North Korea. A son of a hard-working farming couple from the countryside, he'd rapidly risen among the ranks of the government and had been elected to become his country's representative at the United Nations General Assembly. He'd been at this job for years and had fine-tuned diplomacy to an art form. When you represent a leader as unpredictable as his, deflecting criticism and turning arguments around become second nature. But this year, his mission at the UN Head Quarters was different.

Ten days ago, he'd been summoned by the Supreme Leader. The leader rarely ever bothered with the UN, choosing instead to make his own speeches and decisions. So Kang was scared out of his wits; nothing good ever came from a visit to the Leader. He could barely walk straight as he made his way up the Ryongsong Residence. Entering the main office, he saw not his leader, but a bald man in his late 40s, an American. Faint blood stains coated the wall behind the Leader's plush office chair. You didn't need to be a genius to figure out what had happened there. The stranger held out a tablet that was streaming something. Kang had taken one look at the live video of his kidnapped wife and child and had sworn his support for whatever was needed of him, _just please don't hurt my family._

The bald man, Alexander, as he'd introduced himself, went on to explain a plan that chilled Kang to his bones. But Kang had acquiesced, family came above all else, and he believed this Alexander would torture his family to death if he showed any signs of non-cooperation. He knew the signs of true insanity, and this Alexander person was criminally insane.

With a heavy heart, Kang made his way past the gleaming marble-tiled lobby and took a right, heading to the elevators. He smiled politely at a young intern wearing a Nigerian flag on his lapel. Disembarking on the first floor - the United Nations General Assembly Hall - he took in the massive space. A circular dome capped the gigantic room and the balcony seats stretched out behind him, a floor above the rest of the hall. He quickly found his seat among the seemingly endless rows of gleaming desks and waited for the rest of the delegates to file in.

 _God help us all._

* * *

 **The Watch Tower**

 **June 16, 2018 - 1207 hrs Eastern Time - 1607 hrs GMT**

"Cyborg, situation report," Batman barked as the League filed into the Battle Room.

Cyborg stood at one end of the room with ultra high-definition screens taking up the entire wall behind him. He mentally linked up with the bank of monitors behind him and displayed various live and delayed feeds from CCTV cameras. Audible gasps were heard from around the room. He switched on his telepathic communicator and indicated that the rest of the League do the same. Normal speech would waste valuable time; telepathic speech was twenty times faster.

'At precisely twelve hundred hours Eastern Time, eight minutes ago, a high-level energy pulse originated in Manhattan, New York. Superman's sensors picked it up immediately but failed to localize the target since there was a cloaking pulse that obscured the main one. Ten seconds later, tremors began to rock the United Nations Head Quarters on First Avenue and the building began to show cracks on the outside as you can see on screen three. Ten seconds later, the entire building caved in. I ruled out the involvement of explosive devices in a preliminary evaluation, but the real cause is not yet determined. There were more than two-hundred world leaders and diplomats inside the building, more than five thousand people, total. Every electrical device on Manhattan was affected by the electromagnetic energy put out by the pulse and first responders are unable to get to the scene due to disabled vehicles plugging the island roads. At least for the next one or two hours, the League is all that the survivors are going to get for help. Superman has already sent for two of his flat deck ships to set up above the area but his robots are unable to help due to the residual discharge from the energy pulse.'

Victor then quickly beamed into their minds the various action plans and everyone acknowledged. It was go time. The briefing had taken all of twenty seconds.

Superman and Wonder Woman blurred to the Earth-facing external hatches and were entering the planet's atmosphere in blazing fireballs seconds later. They arrived in New York with heat rolling off them in waves and their suits smoking. Flash teleported down a second later. The speedster's first order of business was to restore power to the island, there was no saying how many more lives would be lost if all the hospitals and emergency services in the city went without power for an extended period of time. Diana would handle the perimeter of the building collapse, rescuing people who'd been caught by the flying debris. She flew them up to the Flat decks where the League Doctors and volunteers from Doctors without Borders were beginning to teleport in.

Clark scanned the central area of the fallen building and immediately noticed something off. A substantial portion of the building was simply missing. He'd been fearing at least five thousand victims in the collapse but there seemed to be only around a thousand.

'Victor, track the energy pulse. You're right, it wasn't an explosion. I think a large scale teleportation might be the likely culprit. It seems that entire floors of the building were relocated, causing the structure to cave into the basement.'

He marked the locations of every breathing survivor in the area. _Good, most are still alive, trapped in air pockets._ He blurred to the victims through the debris, knowing that if he went fast enough he'd simply cut through the concrete like a laser through butter, without any risk of damage to the material around. As he grabbed each victim, his bio-electric field extended over them, rendering them invincible for as long as he held them. This let him fly through the concrete and steel without worrying for their safety.

It took him the better part of an hour to rescue everyone; the League helped with the rest of the island and stayed out of Clark's way, they'd decided it best not to risk disturbing the delicately balanced rubble, a slight slip might end up crushing more people. He pulled out the last survivor of the attack, a young woman in her 20s, and brought her to the ship floating half a kilometre directly above the UN Plaza. He dropped back down to the building below. He could leave the rest to the emergency crews, but his sense of honour demanded that he stay to bring out the bodies of those who'd been caught in the attack. Diana had offered to help, but he'd politely demurred. The sooner this was done, the better. The Amazon had been joined by Hal Jordan and the two were finishing up with first aid in the surrounding area. The immediate emergencies had all been taken care of.

Clark gently laid the final body on the deck of his ship and covered it with a white sheet. A long row of sheets stretched out in front of him, and looking at all the extinguished lives, he clenched his fists. It was all he could do to hold in his despair.

 _It never gets easier._

He rested for a moment in the sky, feeling the hum of powerful Kryptonian engines under his feet. It was mid-afternoon in Manhattan and the glass covered buildings gleamed blue beneath clear skies. Helicopters were buzzing on the periphery of Brooklyn and West New York but stayed a safe distance away. Cyborg had patched through to La Guardia, Westchester County and Philadelphia International, requesting Air Traffic Control to designate Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs a no-fly zone and to ground all nearby flights, the static discharge could wreak havoc with the delicate controls of a helicopter or plane. Clark could hear ambulances and fire trucks racing towards Manhattan from across the river in Brooklyn, Queens, Williamsburg, and Jersey City. The bridges and tunnels had to clear up for the emergency crews to reach the city, the League could only do so much for such a densely populated region.

"Wally, how go the repairs?"

A buzz of static came through as Wally spoke, it happened whenever he was in the middle of a run; the speed force apparently went poorly with modern electronics.

"It's shaping up well, Clark. GE is giving us the transformers we need to get the hospitals up and running. Ninety percent of the vehicles on the roads are functional again, the electromagnetic energy levels have fallen to acceptable levels. Fuel injection was the main issue in most stalled cars, but it seems alright now. Our boy John here is using his sweet constructs to shift the remaining stalled ones onto the pavement. We're clearing up a path to the tunnels and bridges."

"Great work, Wally. I'll see you back at the station in fifteen. We need you for what's about to come, Zatanna and Star Girl are porting down to relieve you."

"Will do, Big Blue. Flash out."

Clark rendezvoused with Diana above West Village - she'd grabbed them both a latte from a little neighbourhood coffee shop whose sales were about to shoot through the roof. They discussed the attack as they flew up to the Watchtower. They still had ten minutes before the station would rise into orbit over the US mainland.

"You okay?" Diana gently asked Clark.

"As well as anyone could be in the face of all that, I guess."

"No, the people who died. Why did you insist on being alone? You know I would have been at your side," Diana said.

"I know, Di. I know. It's just... They had no business dying today. They didn't sign up for this. They aren't soldiers or warriors. All that we do, we do it for them so that they can live happy, peaceful lives. What kind of world are we building if we can't guarantee their safety?"

Diana flew closer to Clark and held him so that the two faced each other, sixty kilometres above ground.

"Kal, we aren't gods. I hate to be harsh when you're vulnerable my love, but you need to hear this. They don't need us. They don't need our powers or our technology. They'll struggle without us, true. They'll sometimes lack direction, true. But they'll always come through. Humanity is resilient, Kal. We're here not because they need us, but because _we_ need _them_. They give our lives meaning and purpose. Don't think of this as your job, think of this as a blessing, something you're doing for yourself. Billions of people are looking at their televisions right now, angry, restless, wishing that they could do _something_ , _anything_ , to get the culprits. But you and I are among the lucky few who get that opportunity. Now, as Oliver usually puts it, let's get those sons of bitches!"

Diana smiled and made to fly higher, but Kal pulled her back. He claimed her lips in a sudden kiss that made her feel light-headed, _or was it the lack of air?_ She decided that she didn't care as Kal whispered a heartfelt 'I love you' against her lips, and she deepened the kiss, pulling him closer. The Watchtower rose from the faraway horizon, its acres of solar panels glinting in the sunlight, but was ignored as the two heroes enjoyed a brief, but passionate respite from a terrible day.

* * *

 **The Watch Tower**

 **June 16, 2018 - 1400 hrs Eastern Time - 1800 hrs GMT**

The gleaming space station lazily passed over the Pacific, it's conference halls and training rooms were completely deserted. Most of the junior League had been deployed in South East Asia where a severe flood had begun to ravage entire countries. Seventy-five percent of Bangladesh would be five feet under water by tomorrow.

Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Flash, Batman, Hawkgirl, and the Green Lantern John Stewart were gathered around a large holographic table, intently listening to Cyborg as he explained the results of his investigation.

"The first thing that stunned me about this case was the teleportation itself. As far as I know, the only person with the technology to stably teleport such a large mass is in this room with us. I've done some research of my own and I've read Oa's research on this topic; no one has ever been able to successfully achieve transporting a large mass over any distance, except Superman. The most that they've managed is to transport a small vehicle. When they tried to move a large body, the structure simply crumbled, it was not strong enough to withstand the forces. So, I went over the energy signatures from NYC once more and I noticed a magical undertone at the lowest end of the frequency spectrum..."

Clark tilted his head back and closed his eyes, coming to an understanding, "Of course..."

Cyborg continued, "They had a man inside the General Assembly hall as a focal point and they used his magic-enhanced body to pick up the entire structure safely. For example, imagine a giant, thin-walled paper ball. If you pick it up using your fingers at the sides, it'll get squished into itself and lose its shape. But, if you manage to get a string through its centre, you can hold it safely and lift it without compromising its structure. That's what happened here. And I even found out who the man was. Cha Seung Kang, a top diplomat from North Korea. An innocent joe, who, only ten days ago, was asked to meet the North Korean Leader. So I hacked into their security network."

He smiled grimly.

"Guess who I found on a CCTV grab?"

John swore and Batman's lip curled as an image of Lex Luthor floated above the table.

"He killed the North Korean Leader. He engineered this whole attack and blackmailed Kang into working for him," Victor concluded.

Hawkgirl demanded, "Did you trace the energy signature? I'm gonna smash that bald head in and not one of you is going to stop me."

Victor nodded. He waved his hands and a 3-D satellite map of a large group of islands came into view.

"This is the Stockholm Archipelago. A group of thirty-thousand islands right outside the capital of Sweden. I traced the signal to the Hjälmö island, the rough centre of the island group. I wanted to send out a drone to investigate, but the surrounding airspace is being painted with Surface-Air Missile Radar, so I decided against it. I've retrofitted one of our Javelin ships with an array of sensors and tasked it to a geo-synchronous orbit over Sweden, thirty-six thousand kilometres high. It should reach station in a few seconds."

The bank of screens to their side came online, displaying a high altitude shot of Earth. Wally let out a low whistle, "Man, it really sucks that I can't fly. Look at that view!"

Victor took over camera control as the Javelin came to a synchronous orbit with respect to the surface of the planet. It would now stay directly above Stockholm as long as it was needed. Victor zoomed in with the telescopic cameras on Stockholm city, quickly assessing if the city had been affected - it wasn't. He shifted the focus Eastwards, panning over small islands and calm blue waters sparkling under the afternoon sun. He paused at one of the larger islands in the island chain and refined and zoomed in on a smoking patch of rock.

"It's the UN building," J'onn muttered.

The smoke was obscuring the visuals, so Victor switched to infrared. There were a few people surrounding the out-of-place building. The heat signatures picked up were run through the League database and were tagged as Cheetah, Solomon Grundy, Clayface and a couple of other colourful characters.

"Zoom out," Clark told Victor.

"Damn... I think we're up against the entire lot of morons, folks," John said. The islands surrounding the main one were crawling with heat signatures, it seemed that all of Earth's villains had banded together under Lex Luthor. They were guarding the UN building closely.

Clark had seen enough, Lex was planning something unpleasant, and the quicker he was stopped, the better.

"Alright, here's plan A. Brute force is out of the question. My battleships are useless inside Earth's atmosphere and so close to a hostage situation. As for our own powers, on any other day, we can defeat them hands down, but today I think it best if we adopt a stealthy approach. Victor, reach out to NATO and have them declare the Baltic Sea and Sweden a no-fly zone, those SAM systems have a range of five hundred kilometres and I don't want to hand Lex a commercial airliner on a plate..."

Clark paused, looking closely at the screen.

"Is that a ferry?"

Victor zoomed in, and mentally cross-checked the Swedish shipping manifests for the day.

"Yeah, it's the Silja Serenade. It's carrying around two-thousand five hundred people. It docks at Stockholm in half an hour and returns to Helsinki immediately two hours later with a fresh set of passengers."

"Victor, can you operate a cruise ship from up here?" Diana asked, picking up on Clark's line of thought.

Victor shrugged, "Sure, as long as the engines and fuel is in order, I think so."

Clark turned to the screen. "Good, that's our way in, we commandeer the ship and get all civilians off-board. You see how these guys are spread out on the islands? They're waiting for us to come blazing in from above. Circe and Talia are here and here, at the edges, ready to take me down with magic the second I enter the scene. Black Flash and Zoom are hiding in these two islands over here, with a clear view of the main island. When Flash tries to recon the UN building, they'll flank him from the sides. They have Surface-Air Missile systems here, here, and here scanning the skies to make sure that Hawgirl or Diana don't slip through, or so that Batman doesn't come in flying low on his plane. Sinestro is hovering above the building, no doubt waiting to get a shot at you, John. J'onn, Firefly is out for you. See that device he's holding? That's a phase differentiator, Bruce and I found one in Grodd's lab a few years back. It lets them see you even you're out of phase and invisible."

Batman tapped the screen with his finger.

"I agree with Kent. They're letting civilian ships pass by and the people in the ships aren't picking up on the wreckage nearby. I'm guessing Talia and Circe are weaving a spell of concealment in the area. The humans won't detect them. Our adversaries are going to be looking at the skies, and they won't suspect a ferry as long as they think it's routine transport. Take this path with the ferry, Victor. Make sure the engine revolutions are high, I want high cavitation on the propellors. The noise and the wake created by the ship will obscure our presence. We'll get off at different points along the route and take down each of them quietly. We slowly work our way to Hjälmö, at which point it should be safer to get the world leaders and delegates off the island. Clark, I suggest you keep a flat deck on standby so that we can evacuate them on short notice."

Clark nodded. "My Fortress is close to the region. Should take my ship only a minute to reach there."

Diana wrapped up the meeting, summarizing the plan and refining it. Clark contacted Zatanna and Green Arrow and asked them to make their way, incognito, to the Stockholm Ferry Terminal. The League needed their best and brightest on this. Too many cooks spoil the broth, but too few make it raw.

Wally took a deep breath as they were about to disperse, the mood was sombre as they all realized the dangers of the mission they were about to undertake.

"Whatever happens out there, I want you all to know that it was an honour to work alongside you."

"The honour is ours, dear friend," J'onn replied seriously.

Bruce barked out, "Better get your asses safely out of there. I'm taking the League to Ibiza for the weekend."

"Aww, Bruce, is someone getting sentimental?" Diana teased him in a baby voice.

Bruce grumbled under his breath as they all chuckled.

"Might as well wear a clown outfit at this point," he grumpily complained as John gave him a backslap.

 _...to be continued_

* * *

A.N: I like using real-world locations. But most real-world events haven't happened here. For example 9/11 never happened in this world. So this is fictional New York's first major disaster in this century, and as we will see, this will have ramifications as the story progresses.


	10. Chapter J

A young woman walked down the crowded sidewalk, weaving gracefully between intrusive shoulders and swinging arms. She wore her midnight-black hair in a tight bun and was cloaked in a beige trench coat that reached past her knees. She was no slouch in the height department, approaching five-eleven, but it seemed that everyone in the Nordic countries was taller than her. _Even that blonde high school bimbo in front of me. Is a skirt that short even legal for teenagers? God, I wish my thighs were as toned as hers._ She jumped as a man brushed her side. She half turned, to tell him to go screw himself, but she relaxed when she saw it was only Oliver Queen in a dark green hoodie, faded jeans, and Vans shoes.

"You seem to be on edge, Zee. You alright?" he asked her.

The League magician known as Zatanna Zatarra smirked.

"Remind me to compliment Dinah once we get back. You're actually turning into a half-decent human-being, Ollie."

"Ouch, right to the heart. So if I'm a decent person now, what was I before?"

"A sleazebag. Philandering billionaire. Party queen. Emotional wreck. Sociopath. Should I continue?"

Oliver chuckled, "Nah, I think I got the gist of it."

They walked in silence towards the Ferry Terminal, a few hundred metres away.

"How do you have enough arrows?" Zatanna suddenly asked.

"Huh?" Oliver was confused.

"Arrows. You somehow never run out of them in battle. I've always wondered how you do that."

"Ah, my arrows are hollow and made of a light metal. So Cyborg hooked me up with a quick, miniaturized 3-D printer that prints arrows when I need them. I added a few inches to the bottom of my quiver - get your mind out the gutter, Zee, and stop smirking - and I slotted in the printer and a few pounds of tightly compressed metal that the printer uses to print the arrows."

"Somehow I envisioned something more exciting than a printer," Zatanna fake yawned.

"Well, I can fly now, if that helps," he offered.

"Nope, not really," she squinted at him as they approached the entrance of the low rise building in front of the port. "I still can't see what Dinah sees in you," she teased.

"You're bad for my ego, you know that?" Ollie lamented.

"You know it," she said as they breezed past security.

"Ylluf etaucave gnidliub," Zatanna chanted.

Oliver felt a weird sensation spread through his body, and watched as the people surrounding them turned around and walked out of the terminal without a fuss. The Brazilian band that was playing a popular song in the lobby patiently finished their song and then packed up to leave. It was like a scene out of an 80's cult movie, eerie. In a few short minutes, the entire building was deserted. The two Leaguers made their way to the docks behind the building. A single cruise ship was moored at one of the two wide ship-berths. More than two hundred metres long, it was at least fifteen stories high. It was painted in a pleasant combination of white and blue, and for such a large vessel, it was surprisingly sleek, shaped like an over-sized, water bound bullet train. The captain's Bridge capped off the top front of the ship, jutting out on either side to give navigators a clear view of the sea ahead. Zatanna spotted movement on the crow's nest, where Hawkgirl seemed to be rigging up some equipment. They heard beeping and turned to watch as a truck backed up to the car deck of the ship. Superman waved at them cheerfully from the driver's cabin of the 16 wheeler that was towing a large container.

"Hey, guys! Glad you could make it!"

Oliver and Zatanna walked over the wide ramp and onto the ship. They spotted Clark floating down from the truck.

"I can't believe this ship can even handle that truck," Oliver remarked.

"Are you kidding me? This ship is a beast! It can easily handle around four-hundred cars, so one truck is peanuts."

"You seem almost proud of it, Clark," Zatanna observed, a little amused at how much he looked like a kid in a candy shop.

"I am, indeed. I spend so much time with my tech that I sometimes forget to see just how far humans have come with theirs."

The trio walked around to the back of the truck.

"Bruce wanted some things from the Fortress, and I might have taken the liberty of bringing you guys a few toys too. Enjoy," he grinned as he swung open the doors to the container and watched Oliver's and Zatanna's mouths swing open.

Zatanna exclaimed, "Holy f-"

Captain's Bridge, The Silja Serenade

"Do you have control?"

"Yes Batman, the engines are running fine. I should be able to handle the ship now. Initiating remote control," Victor's voice came through the communicator.

Victor Stone, known as the Cyborg, was on the Watch Tower, controlling and enabling the entire operation, moving pieces around like in a game of chess, only here, the stakes were incalculable.

Batman grunted his acknowledgement and left the Bridge to check up on the equipment he'd requested from Clark.

* * *

 **The Island of Grinda, Stockholm Archipelago**

 _Whoooosh_

A peal of laughter burst out and Captain Cold smirked. Circe was holding up a bird frozen in flight.

"Now what did that bird ever do to you?" Harley asked as she twirled her bat around, inspecting the island around her.

The trio had been on the island for over two hours and was growing bored. They turned to watch as a blue-white cruise ship lazily drifted by, trying not to go too fast in the small waterways of the archipelago. Yet another civilian ship doing its thing.

Circe spotted the shock-wave the millisecond before it her, but even she was too slow to avoid it. They screamed and fell to their knees as a wall of pure sound slammed into them from the ship. Harley was knocked out cold instantly and Captain Cold was near-unconscious. Circe was getting to her feet as Flash blurred in and cuffed the three and laid them on the ground. He used an anaesthetic device to cover Circe's mouth and keep her asleep for the duration of the battle. He hid them underneath a camouflage blanket and marked the location for the League's retrieval team to find later.

Over the next fifteen minutes, as the ship slowly trundled by the rest of the islands, the Injustice League found themselves out of action before they could even comprehend what was going on. By the time the ship left the archipelago, every island except the main one was secure and around a hundred and fifty Injustice Leaguers lay incapacitated and marked for retrieval.

Diana felt the ship come to a halt underneath her feet.

"I'm tasking the ship back to Stockholm on a longer route. You guys can meet it there after the mission to get your stuff," Cyborg said.

"Thanks, Victor," Clark spoke into the communicator.

"And guys," Victor continued. "Forget stealth on the main island, Luthor knows you're coming. They had Firefly go check out one of the other islands and found their people neatly packaged and out of order."

Diana looked at Clark.

"Shock and awe?" she asked.

Clark nodded with the hint of a smile.

"Let's do our thing."

"Not that it doesn't sound ridiculously awesome when you two say it like that, but what's your thing?" Wally asked.

Diana chuckled. "Just a small technique that we perfected in Asgard. It's a lot of fun. You guys stay exactly a second behind us. For this to work, you have to come in as soon as we start and get the UN people out," she instructed.

The League agreed.

 **Hjalmo Island**

Lex Luthor was angry. His best plan yet, his one chance at redemption, had gone awry, and it hadn't even been a fight. Three-fourths of his people were out of commission and he didn't even have an idea of who he was up against. He'd gathered the rest of his League together tightly surrounding the stolen UN building on the island, each armed with Kryptonite and powerful weapons. He had speedsters manning the area, so he wasn't worried about the Justice Leaguers sneaking up on the scene.

A loud boom suddenly shook the island. And another. And another. The island began vibrating uncontrollably and Lex was stumbling around trying to find a footing. Zoom and the other evil speedsters lost their posture for a millisecond, and that was all the invitation Clark needed, he flew in low at just under the speed of sound and threw every villain in the vicinity straight up into the air. In three milliseconds, they were cresting a few kilometres into the air, where John Stewart and Hal Jordan were waiting for them with giant, green baseball gloves and a League troop carrier.

Lex Luthor managed to stand straight finally and all he saw was the crest of the house of El filling up his vision. He looked up to see Superman staring down at him with a smirk on his face, but a simmering anger lay underneath the smirk. Lex tried to shove his Kryptonite ring in Superman's face, but the latter didn't even flinch as the stone touched his face.

"You really think that after all these years, I'm going to let myself be taken down by a rock, Luthor?"

Clark moved back as Diana flew in, her fists dirty from pummeling the surface of the island. Luthor's eyes widened.

"You..." he sputtered.

"...were responsible your break-dancing. Yes. Yes, I was. You're not half bad a dancer Lex, I think you missed your true calling."

"Hey John!" Clark spoke into his communicator.

"Yes Clark?"

"Go long!"

Diana picked up the cowering psychopath by the scruff of his neck and threw him like a baseball. He disappeared from view in a few seconds.

Clark felt a little disappointed when John called in to say a few seconds later that he'd caught the man around a hundred kilometres away.

"That vermin ain't got nothin' on us," Diana stated proudly, and Clark chuckled.

"What?" she asked.

"You're cute."

"I am _not_ cute, Clark! You take that back right now or I'm going to throw you to heaven like I did Luthor."

"Oh trust me, Diana, in a short while, _I_ am definitely going to take _you_ to heaven. Do you have any idea how delectable you look right now, with your dirty hair and glistening body?" Diana blushed and smacked Clark.

"I hate that you know how to embarrass me and turn me on at the same time," she said in a sultry voice.

They heard retching voices on the communicator.

"For God's sake you two, turn off your damn microphones," Bruce's voice came in.

And it was Diana's turn to smirk as Clark blushed.


	11. Chapter K

**June 17, 2018**

 **Kent Farms**

A Bentley Bentayga drove through the rickety, wooden gateway, kicking up a trail of dust as it neared the farmhouse. Gravel crunched satisfyingly as Bruce drove the SUV inside the barn.

"Whoa! Bruce what are you doing?!" one of his co-passengers shouted.

Bruce Wayne chuckled and drove right through the far end of the barn. Rather than crash into the wood, the 250,000 Dollar car emerged unscathed into a room so white that the walls and ceilings couldn't be discerned. Bruce slowed the car and pulled up next to a Lamborghini Veneno and a Cadillac Escalade.

"Looks like Oliver and Lois are here already," he commented.

Selina looked confused at the Cadillac as she exited the passenger seat.

"Why in the world would Lois drive that beast? Or does it belong to J'onn?" she asked.

"No, it's Lois' alright," Bruce replied. "We had an intervention for her a while back. She almost died in a car chase when she was investigating Intergang. I bought the car and Clark turned it into a fortress. That thing is actually more secure than the limo that the US President uses."

Selina chuckled, "Why am I not surprised? Lois and her antics."

"You guys sure I won't be intruding?" a voice piped out from behind Bruce's back as the back door of the car shut with a muted thud.

Selina turned around, "Of course not, Steph. They're going to love you! Come here."

She pulled the thirteen-year-old to her side and put an arm around her shoulders as they walked towards the exit of the endless white room, marked by a shimmering red door.

Stephanie Brown smiled faintly at Selina, "Thanks, Sel. And I've gotta ask, what the heck is this place? It's super creepy."

"You should tell Clark that," Bruce smirked.

And he added by way of explanation, "He uses inter-dimensional technology to add space to anywhere he wants."

"It drives Bruce nuts because Clark won't tell him how it works," Selina laughed.

Stephanie chuckled when she heard her mentor grumble something about a 'smug farm boy' under his breath.

"Bruce and Selina are on the way," Clark looked through the walls of the dining hall towards the barn. "And it seems like they've found themselves another stray."

Lois laughed at that. J'onn looked at his wife with a quizzical look as if to ask what was so funny.

"Leave it to Bruce to become the softest sap of our whole bunch," she explained with a smile to the Leaguers sitting around the long dinner table. And there were quite a few of them.

Every week without fail, the senior members of the Justice League gathered at the apparently inconsequential town of Smallville in Kansas. It was highly informal for a team of professionals, but the weekly meet was second nature to them by now. When the Justice League was formed, more than twelve years ago, the group had only come together to fight off an invasion by White Martians. In the months following that, the newly minted League had floundered, driven this way and that by conflicting egos and ideals.

One day, after a particularly nasty fight between Bruce and Cyborg about the ethics of vigilante justice, Clark had taken them all down to his parents' house. He vowed that if they didn't get their asses down to the farm every weekend for a lunch or dinner, he'd find them and drag them here himself. Bruce grumbled and complained for a month or two, but even he'd grown used to the comfortable routine, and the League had been functioning smoothly ever since. It was no longer a team, but a family, and Clark had counted on the fact that there was no place for an ego in a family.

He smiled as looked around the table at his friends and family. They'd all come a long way. Sat at the head of the table were Jonathan and Martha Kent, the two people to whom he owed everything. They'd aged gracefully and were in their late fifties now. In their twenties — a time for most couples to be irresponsible, crazy and in love — they'd taken in and nursed an orphan from the stars, not caring about the consequences. He sometimes wondered if they understood just how important what they'd done was from a cosmic perspective. They'd quite literally saved an entire civilization from the brink of extinction.

He sat to their left with Diana by his side. His eyes shifted to the couple sitting to his parents' right, Lois Lane and J'onn J'onzz. There couldn't have been a better match, Clark mused. It was easy to forget these days that J'onn was a few hundred years old. His ridiculously calm countenance was a perfect foil to Lois' endless energy and bouts of well-meaning insanity as she pursued a story. The two lived in suburban Metropolis. Lois headed the City Desk at The Daily Planet and J'onn worked as Officer John Jones of the Metropolis Police Department. They'd made a good life for themselves.

Sat to their right were Oliver and Dinah Laurel Queen. It was a source of endless fascination to Clark how Oliver had settled down into domestic life. He'd come back from the "dead" in 2010 and had immediately proceeded to sleep around and make a general ass of himself in the public's eye. At the end of the year, he'd again gone missing. Laurel, who was worried sick, had called up Clark in Metropolis and asked him to find Oliver. Clark tracked his heartbeat using an old ECG scan and the two found him in an abandoned warehouse in Star City, barely alive and in his Green Arrow suit. Laurel had taken matters into her own hands from that point and had turned Ollie's life around, shoving him headfirst into the Justice League and teaching him to channel his anger into positive things.

Clark had a special spot in his heart for Laurel. While Lois was the first of his friends to have known about his Kryptonian heritage, Laurel was the first to show him that he was so much more than his powers. Although they'd never admitted it to anyone else and never would, Clark and Laurel had been in a two-month relationship back when Clark had first shifted to Star City in '06. They'd realized very soon that it was purely physical and had made sure that both were fine with it being only that. But when Clark met Helena Bertinelli, he'd begun developing feelings for her. And he and Laurel, after a thoroughly satisfying final dalliance, had promised each other that they'd always remain friends. And that friendship lasted to this day. He cared deeply about her and had been overjoyed when Oliver had confessed to Clark that he was going ask for Dinah's hand in marriage. Clark had even given her away at their wedding, later making sure to use his best Superman voice to warn Ollie of the consequences of not taking good care of his new wife. The couple lived in Star City, with Oliver worked days as the CEO of Queen Enterprises and Laurel managing a pro-bono legal clinic that she founded, helping the poor with their legal issues.

With a jolt, Clark realized he'd zoned out, reminiscing about old stories at the dinner table. He looked around and saw everyone frozen in mid-action, well... almost everyone. Kara, sitting near Diana, was gazing at Zatanna on the other side of the table. Wally West, who sat on Kara's other side, seemed impatient and was playing with globules of water that hung in the air in front of him.

"Bored, Wally?" Clark asked.

Wally jumped and his eyes widened.

"Clark! Damn. I don't think I'm ever gonna get used to you talking to me in this time frame. But nah, I'm good, Clark, just messing around."

Clark chuckled. He watched curiously as Kara heard their conversation and shifted her eyes away from Zatanna with a slight blush. She didn't move or try to converse with Wally and Clark because she'd been thinking in a different time frame, probably a few thousand cycles slower. But she'd heard the accelerated version of their conversation and reacted guiltily.

He slowed down his brain cycles to match that of Kara. Everyone else still remained frozen, but Wally's hands were now a blur as he played with the water in front of him.

"Hey Kara," Clark greeted his cousin.

"Clark." She looked at him and smiled, still sporting the blush.

"You should go for it," he said.

"Go for what?"

Clark looked at Zatanna and then back at Kara.

"I'm sure she'd love to go out with you."

Kara's face first shifted into denial, but then into one of curiosity.

"You think so, Kal?"

"I would bet on it, Kara." He paused to think. "You know how we sometimes spend time together and check out beautiful women? Back when we were dating, Zee and I used to do the same. And I know for a fact that she's dated women before."

"Whoa whoa, I wasn't actually expecting to go through with it, Kal... But I really do like her..." Kara mused, her gaze shifting back to Zatanna, who appeared frozen in the middle of getting a sip of water.

Clark winked at her. "Go for it, couz. She's quite something."

Clark slowed down his cycles further and returned to a normal time frame. He got up to get the door for Bruce, Selina, and their guest.

"Bruce, good to see you. Selina, you look as lovely as always. Nice to meet you, Stephanie." Clark smiled at the nervous girl hiding behind Selina.

"How'd you know who I... oh right, you're Superman," Steph laughed nervously. "Um... nice to meet you too, Superman."

"Come on you three, the others are already here," Clark invited them in and shut the door behind them.

As Bruce and Selina walked into the small dining room and greeted everyone, Stephanie stopped outside and looked ahead in confusion.

"This doesn't make sense."

Clark looked at her with a grin, "What do you notice?"

"I saw the house from the side, and there's no way you can have a dining room that's this big inside this house."

"That's a good observation," Clark laughed. "I made this room larger using some really cool technology. Think of it like adding a hard drive to your laptop, you can make any space as big as you want."

"This is insane," Steph muttered.

Clark chuckled, "Bruce reacted the same way. You'll get used to it soon, don't worry. Why don't you come in and say hello to everyone?"

Stephanie shyly entered the room and Selina introduced her to the League.

"Hey everyone," she mumbled quietly and immediately took a seat near Hawkgirl and John Stewart, the only other people in the room she'd met before. The couple had come a week ago to dinner at Wayne Manor. She really liked Shayera and had been texting her over the last week. The Thanagarian had invited Stephanie over to Washington D.C. where she and John Stewart lived. Steph had never been to D.C. before and was beyond excited for the trip.

With everyone finally at the table, Diana called everyone's attention.

"Alright, is everyone ready? Good. Wally, in three, two, one, go."

Before Diana could even get from the 'g' to the 'o', there was a full plate in front of everyone, served according to their preferences. Wally had a perfect memory.

"Dhish ish delishush Mirshush Ken," Wally spoke, already having stuffed his mouth with lasagna. Everyone at the table laughed and began to dig into the food.

Martha Kent smiled and shook her head, amused. She'd tried to teach table manners to the kid but had quickly given up a few meals in, choosing to rather enjoy the compliments of her biggest fan. She always made sure to bake a pie separately for Wally with a lot of sugar. Cooking for more than 15 people was no easy task, but Clark had brought in special ovens for her that could cook meat and bake pies evenly in seconds. He'd also suggested that he get her a few robots to help in the kitchen, but she'd firmly refused. She'd argued that she barely had to spend any time in the kitchen these days anyway, given how quickly the cooking was done.

Jonathan Kent, by her side, quietly observed the room for a minute or two. When he and Martha had discovered that they couldn't have kids, what followed was one of the saddest periods of their lives. They'd both wanted kids and were devastated. But Clark had arrived soon after from the stars. And now, 33 years later, Martha and he had a family that was bigger and more wonderful than they ever could have dreamed of. He looked at the person that held this family together. Clark Kent. Kal-El of Krypton. Superman... His son. Clark was laughing and teasing Bruce as Diana and Selina watched on, giggling. Here, in this room, everyone was carefree, carrying with them the enthusiasm of children playing around with their friends rather than the weight of being the most powerful group in the known universe with responsibilities and duties that would crush others. If anyone deserved happiness, Jonathan thought, it was the group in front of him.

He said a quick prayer, thanking God. Life was kind.

* * *

A/N:

Hello everyone, this time, I wanted to focus a little on the characters themselves. I think I have a long way to go before I get good at writing wholesome characters. But this was a good experience.

Also, I'll be writing more regularly now. I look forward to hearing from all of you. I'm open to ideas and directions if you have any for the story.


	12. Chapter L

"What do you think? This one or this one?"

Diana held up two dresses up as she looked at her shopping companion for his opinion.

"Go with the red, it complements your eyes," Clark replied in the universal, long-suffering tone of men stuck in a shopping complex for long periods of time.

Diana hid a smile as she asked the attendant who hovered nearby to add the red dress to the sizable collection she had already picked out.

"You're doing this to punish me, aren't you?" Clark asked.

"Now why would I do that, Kal?" Diana asked innocently.

"Diana, come on. You know I can't just go to the gala. I have to protect my identity," Clark explained. "And like we discussed, extensively, you're going to be there and so are the billionaire donors. It's going to be a blast! The people are going to love it!"

"Kal, listen to me. We're talking about medicine based on Kryptonian science and you and Kara have to be there to reassure people that it's safe. It speaks poorly of you if you're not at your own company's fundraiser."

Clark's mouth twisted into a frown as he considered the prospect.

"But what about my disguise?"

"Since you're so against wearing a tuxedo as Superman, just wear one of your Kryptonian ceremonial clothes. They look formal and neat, and they definitely look alien."

Diana moved near him and took his hands into her own.

"And Kal, you're not fooling me with this bit. I can see that this is not what's really bothering you. What is it? What's going on inside that mysterious Kryptonian head of yours?"

Clark smiled. Diana somehow always managed to see through his deflections.

"It's just... so many people are depending on this, and we have to do this exactly right. If we stoke fears or if some person somewhere makes up too big a controversy, we aren't going to be able to help suffering people. I'm just... worried... because we're transitioning from the point where we have all control to the point where it's now the responsibility of the rest of the world, and I don't know how well they're going to handle it."

"They want to help themselves, Kal, and they will. All we should do is enable them. If we hold their hands too much when they learn to walk, they're going to collapse and fall the second we turn our backs. And we don't want that, do we?" Diana asked softly.

"No," Clark begrudgingly agreed. "You're right, of course."

Clark smiled at Diana and dropped a soft kiss on her upturned face.

"But hey, speaking of things we really want, are you done here? Was I punished enough for my reluctance, princess?"

Diana punched him in the arm.

"Idiot. Just when I think we're having a moment, he goes ahead and ruins it," she muttered.

* * *

"You know, it's funny. I've been in the crowd on the other side of this door countless times. I never realized how nerve-wracking it really is," Clark said, nervously adjusting his ceremonial suit's collar.

"You get used to the nerves after a while. I even make it a game to remember if I can remember the faces of the photographers from previous events," Diana replied.

"Really?"

"No, Kal. This might surprise you, but unlike you, I'm not a dork."

"Oh ha-ha. That's cute, Princess."

"I thought you said I was sexy and ravishing, but I'm suddenly cute now?" Diana asked him.

"Diana," Clark replied with an intense look that started at her feet and ended at the deep neckline that showed more than just a little of her flawless skin and curves. "What you really look like is a million wet dreams."

Clark leaned close to her ear and whispered.

"And you're all mine."

Diana moistened her lips, suddenly feeling parched and hot.

"We'll see, Kal. We'll see," she replied, but she didn't sound very convincing. Even to herself.

* * *

Paul Henstridge had been a fashion photographer for the last ten years. He'd taken pictures of the most beautiful people in the world on red carpets and elsewhere. Actors and actresses were one thing — they were pretty people who were famous because they were pretty. But what he really enjoyed was getting to photograph superheroes. These were people who'd done great things for Earth and saved millions of lives. Every one of them had a presence, a rawness and a charisma that translated beautifully into captivating pictures. Oh, and the fact that most of them were drop dead gorgeous was just the cherry on top.

He readied his trusty Canon as a black stretch limo pulled up to the red carpet. Shutters snapped and hundreds of flashes lit the scene as the door nearest the carpet opened to reveal a leg that seemingly went on for miles. The Princess of Themyscira stepped out, dazzling the crowd with a brief smile before moving aside to reveal a taller figure that emerged from the car.

The crowd let out a gasp.

"Is that...?"

"But he never comes..."

"Is this his first red carpet?"

"Superman! Over here!"

"Wonder Woman! Smile over here!"

"Give us a kiss on camera!"

* * *

A good fifteen minutes later, Clark and Diana finally managed to step inside the giant ballroom of The Grand Rayosa Hotel, one of Metropolis' finest establishments. They faced little respite from the crowds even here as the gentry and nobility from countries around the world gravitated towards the super couple.

"Let's split up?" Diana asked.

"Only if I get a kiss," Clark smiled.

"You evil man. Blackmailing a helpless woman," Diana whispered, and gave a quick peck to Clark's lips before disappearing into the crowd, mingling with the elite.

Clark greeted people and exchanged pleasantries with them as he walked through the room. When Kara and he had founded Kandor Inc. more than ten months ago, both of them had failed to consider where it would lead them socially. Their main focus had been to develop a cure for cancer without having to mess with the human genome. It took the two more time than they had anticipated, but their efforts had paid off three months ago when the first successful simulations of the drug popped up on their monitoring devices.

Clark had wanted to fast track it to human trials to immediately begin improving the lives of patients but Kara had opposed him. She argued that there was no need for risky, inconclusive, and time consuming trials when she could build a system that could simulate the human body in its entirety.

Knowing that finishing earlier meant saving lives, Kara had holed up inside the Fortress without sleep for a week working on the new system. Kryptonian computers operated on quantum computing principles; just one of the terminals that she used was more powerful than every computer built by man put together. And she used a hundred of them. She programmed and modelled everything from the smallest bacterium inside the human intestine to the moles that popped up based on a random mutation in the human genome. She used the gene sequences that cancer patients and healthy people from around the world had volunteered for research. In the end, she was able to simulate the effects of the drug on a sample set of fifty million human beings.

And the results were very promising indeed. As Clark and Kara had expected, there was zero effect on the genes of the patients and their reproductive cells were never altered. While the failure rate was a success in terms of being very far beneath regulatory thresholds, in around 0.3% of the patients, the cancer responded aggressively to the treatment instead of subsiding.

Kara and Clark debated this for a while, seemingly reaching no conclusion, until thankfully, Kara discovered that a gene group that contributed to a certain phenotype of the digestive system was at fault. She mapped out the alleles of the gene group and modified the cure so that it wouldn't trigger any debilitating effects on the patient's body. She simulated the modified version on the 0.3% subset of people that had failed to respond positively, and met with a resounding success. Their bodies accepted the drugs perfectly.

After a few more weeks of lobbying to the WHO and the UN, the drug was finally approved by international regulatory agencies. Kara and Clark, through Kandor Incorporated, instituted an emergency conference on Kandor Island in the Pacific, an artificial island built to serve as the base of their operations. The two invited distinguished scientists, doctors, and healthcare providers from every country on the planet. Kandor Inc. provided luxurious temporary housing and food for the roughly five thousand people that took part in the conference. They split up into different groups that worked on various populations around the world, taking into consideration socio-economic factors and even religious and superstitious beliefs. The Kryptonian Artificial Intelligence system, Kelex, was instrumental in tying the work of all these groups together to provide coherent results and mitigating the chaos that would otherwise ensue when such a large group of people worked together. At the end of the the four week long conference, a delivery system was finally designed, suitable for every demographic in the world.

And here they were, on launch day. The richest people from around the world were gathered here today. The medical community had appealed to the rich to fund the production, distribution, and delivery of the cure so that even the poorest of the poor could avail themselves of it. And remiss to pass up such a good opportunity for publicity, even the selfish among the rich had fallen over themselves in donating to the cause.

Clark turned as he heard Kara's heartbeat nearby. She'd just arrived. He raised his eyebrows, surprised to see her date for the evening. _She works fast._

"Kal! Isn't all this amazing?" Kara gushed, seeing her cousin.

"It sure is!" Clark gave her a warm hug.

"Zee, you look as lovely as always," Clark smiled.

Zee smiled, looking a little abashed, "Good to see you too, Superman. So... this is pretty awkward..."

Kara chuckled, "Not at all. Kal was actually the one who encouraged me to ask you out, Zee."

"Huh," Zee mused out aloud. "I've never dated cousins before."

Clark made a face.

"God, I hope not."

Zee slapped his arm, "I wasn't talking about my cousins, you perv."

"Could we talk about literally anything other than dating cousins?" Clark asked, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

"Sure, Kal," Kara smirked. "Let's talk about something else. Zee was just telling me about how she taught you tantric sex."

Clark blushed and nervously adjusted his collar.

"I'm beginning to regret encouraging you, Kara. It was bad enough dealing with one of you, but now I have to put up with both of you tormenting me?"

Kara looked at Zee, catching her eyes for a long moment before turning to Clark.

"You dug your own hole, Kal. Initial reports suggest that you're going to have to put up with the two of us for a long, long time."

"I agree, Superman," Zee said with a blush at Kara's indirect admission. She added with a stage whisper, "It also really helps that your cousin is smoking hot. I mean, have you seen her in her tight costume? lla esoht yxes sevruc, am I right?"

Clark closed his eyes and shook his head, dispelling the images from it. "You two are going to kill me, I just know it," he said before abruptly turning around and walking to where Diana stood, talking with a foreign leader. He was getting a headache.

Kara and Zatanna laughed.

"God, I love messing with his head," Kara said.

"Uh-huh, I can see that," Zatanna joked.

She added, after a slight hesitation. "Did you really mean what you said? About us?"

Kara became shy. At 6'2'', she was a good head taller than Zatanna's 5'8'', but standing there, blushing, she suddenly looked like the young woman entering her twenties that she really was.

"Well... yeah... I don't mean to scare you away, Zee. But I can't put into words how much I'm attracted to you. I want to be with you."

"Good," Zatanna whispered before wrapping her hands around Kara's neck and bridging the distance between them.

"I really."

 _Kiss_.

"Really."

 _Kiss._

" _Really_ like you too."

* * *

Clark joined Diana as she was smiling and shaking hands with the Indian Prime Minister, Dr. Vijay Subramanian. Clark greeted the man himself.

"How are you, Dr. Subramanian?" Clark asked.

"I'm doing well, Superman. And please call me Vijay."

Clark nodded his head, "Call me Kal-El... Doctor Vijay."

Vijay laughed and looked at Diana, "I'm not going to win this one, am I?"

Diana shook her head with a smile. "I can't figure it out either. He refuses to call any medical doctor by their first names."

Vijay replied with a smile, "Oh? I can understand that. In Indian culture, we're taught to always show respect to people in the medical industry in very much the same manner."

Clark agreed, "Yeah, it was my adopted mother who drilled that into me. She taught me to respect any person who was 'in the business of saving lives,' as she put it."

"Speaking of saving lives, tell me, Supe- Kal-El, how is the Global Defense Force coming along?"

Last year, the Indian Prime Minister had come under attack from a group of mercenaries, both alien and human. The Prime Minister's armed team was handling things well until Solomon Grundy showed up. Superman and Green Arrow had teleported in to help with the fight. After a warm expression of gratitude, Dr. Vijay had volunteered Indian support and substantial resources for a Global Defense Force, an idea that Superman had floated in front of the G20 conference a few months prior to the incident.

"It's coming along beautifully, Dr. Vijay. Thanks to your open embrace of the idea, most countries around the world are signing up for it. But we're making sure to exclude countries that openly harbor terrorists and those that are run by dictators."

"Oh," Vijay asked with a concerned look on his face. "But, Chi..."

Clark assured him, "Oh we'll still be protecting every person on Earth regardless of their country. There will be no discrimination there, but we don't think it's a good idea to take money from governments like that. Their interests are far from altruistic... I'm sure you know better than most leaders what I'm talking about."

"Yeah, unfortunately, I do," Vijay sighed, before shrugging comically. "Neighbours, can't live with them, can't live without them."

Diana laughed.

"That is true. A few thousand years ago, Themyscira and Atlantis were at each other's throats. Since Olympus prohibited our nations from openly warring against each other, we turned to other means of fighting. My mother and Atlanna are still embarrassed by the petty things their countries did to each other back then."

"But," Diana added. "Our nations are close allies today and my mother and Atlanna are the best of friends. So, don't worry too much, Vijay. I'm sure there's hope for reconciliation with your neighbors in the future."

"I'll drink to that, your highness. Or at least, I would if my wife lets me," Vijay said, and added remorsefully. "She doesn't though. Anyway, it has been wonderful talking with you both. Superman, I'll meet you at the GDF conference next month. Princess Diana, I'll see you at the Environmental Summit this December. And I wish you two all the best with your efforts here. India will be setting up a National Centre for Cancer to monitor the disease in our country. I do hope you'll consider dropping in some time."

Clark smiled warmly, "I would love to. Take care, Dr. Vijay."

"Bye, Vijay."

Clark commented after the Prime Minister left them.

"I like the guy."

Diana gave Clark an amused look.

"Do I need to be worried?"

Clark chuckled, "Just because Kara is switching sides doesn't mean that I will too."

Diana looked confused, "What do you mean Kara is switching sides?"

Clark pointed Diana towards where Kara and Zatanna were holding each other on the dance floor, gently moving to the slow music. They seemed lost in each other's eyes.

Diana gasped, "Holy sh- moly, I did _not_ see that coming!"

"Moly? You've been hanging around Mary Marvel too much, Diana."

"Mary? You have no idea. That little snot has a mouth that's filthier than Constantine. And please, you're in no position to talk. I heard you say 'gosh darn' yesterday. What are you, an old lady from Britain?"

Clark shrugged, "Hey, what can I say? I am a thousand years old. Maybe I dig eighty-year-old British chicks."

Diana smacked him. "One of these days, I'm going to elope with a hundred-year-old stud from Turkey. That'll show you."

"Maybe I'll run away with Artemis. That'll show you."

Diana gave him a look.

"Too far?"

"Too far, Kal. She's too hot for you to make a joke about running away with her."

"You're right. I'm sorry."

"You think she's too hot?"

"Well yeah, she's got an amazing body, her long red hair is the stuff of dreams and those beautiful sculpted le-"

Clark stopped, recognizing the look in Diana's eyes. He gulped. "Um, Diana, we're just making conversation, okay?"

She looked dubious at his claim.

"So you're not in interested in Artemis?"

"Not at all. You're all I want, Diana."

"Well, that's too bad, because Artemis and I used to be lovers and I was thinking about inviting her to-"

"Yes! I mean... yeah, whatever, that's cool."

Clark tried to seem cool but Diana frowned at him.

"We're going to have a long talk about this later, mister. You're getting too excited for my liking."

"So... No threesome?"

"A long, long talk."

* * *

"...and so, with this series of treatments and medicines, we hope to eradicate the disease of cancer completely. We thank each and every one of you here today. Because of your contributions, we can afford to treat people suffering from cancer no matter their income bracket. I hope you're all very proud of yourselves, you're saving thousands of lives. And I sincerely hope that we will all continue to work together to make our planet a better place. Cheers!"

Kara lifted her glass in a salute to the crowd. She received a standing ovation as she stepped back from the podium. Her research had spawned a cure that humanity had been seeking for the last half century. It was a fair statement to say that Kara Zor-El was loved by everyone who'd even just heard of her. And the news that she was dating a woman only endeared her to people around the world, helping millions of people become better accustomed to people of the same sex having romantic relationships.

Zatanna, Diana, and Clark greeted her as she walked off the stage.

"That was wonderful, Kara!" Zatanna gushed.

Diana gave Kara a hug. "That was a beautiful speech, sister."

"I'm proud of you, Kara," Clark said as he stepped forward to wrap her in a hug.

"Thanks, Kal... For everything," she whispered as she tightly held her cousin. It was surreal. She'd woken up on an alien planet just over a year ago and yet, here she was already, accepted by the population and making a difference. She would never let him know of course, but she could never be thankful enough for having Kal-El in her life. On Earth, he'd matured into a warm, loving being and had opened his life to his long lost cousin with open arms and no conditions. She also loved the fact that he was flustered so easily by anything and everything.

"Zatanna says you're good at eating out."

Kal released her and stepped back, looking at both Zatanna and Kara with wide eyes.

"Ew! I'm talking about restaurants, you perv. I want recommendations for good restaurants in Metropolis, Kal."

Clark stared at Kara. "You're evil. _Pure_ evil. You know that?"

Kara smiled innocently. "Who, me?"

Clark muttered to himself, "They call you the boy scout and then people walk all over you. No respect. Zilch." He walked away to grab a bite to eat from a nearby counter.

"Eating out?" Diana asked, finally deciding to help out her boyfriend. "Kal is really good at that. He has this amazing technique too, right Zatanna? You know what I'm talking about, don't you? He starts from the back and works his way down, pausing at..."

Kara turned red and sputtered.

"Okay, I gotta go. Bye."

She did an abrupt turn and walked away, regretting teasing Kal-El in front of Diana. The Princess gave as good as her boyfriend got.

Zatanna laughed aloud at Kara's plight and stepped in closer to whisper in Diana's ear.

"I know exactly what you're talking about. And guess who has the same technique?" She wagged her eyebrows.

"No way," Diana gasped in surprise.

"Yes way. She's even better at it. It's endless," Zatanna shuddered at the pleasant memory from the previous night.

"Holy shit. That's..." Diana breathed as visions of later assailed her. "I... We have to leave, Zee, good seeing you."

With that, Diana dragged a surprised Clark away from where he was getting a plate of hors d'oeuvres.

Zatanna smirked at the receding couple. Clark was in for the night of his life. She stilled as a strong hand encircled her waist and a well-endowed chest pressed into her back.

"Ready to leave?" a warm voice caressed the back of her neck.

"Oh yeah," Zatanna replied in a husky voice as her body heated up instantly at Kara's touch. Zatanna bit back a moan.

 _These Kryptonians are going to be the death of me. But, by God. What a way to go._


End file.
